Tessa’s Recipe Rundown
Taste: Full of sweet butterscotch & chocolate flavors, exactly how a chocolate chip cookie should taste!
Texture: Thick and chock full of gooey chocolate with slightly crisp edges.
Ease: No special ingredients, equipment, or skills needed!
Pros: Easy everyday delightful chocolate chip cookie recipe. I think you’ll love this one.
Cons: None.
Would I make this again? I’ve already made this recipe many times and have the dough in my freezer for when the craving strikes.
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My favorite type of recipe to bake is absolutely COOKIES. They’re so fun and simple and can teach us SO much about the science of baking.
The Ultimate Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies is still one of my most popular posts, visited by over two million people.
That post inspired the creation of my second cookbook, The Ultimate Cookie Handbook. And since THOUSANDS of you have purchased that cookbook, I think it’s clear that we’re all obsessed with cookies here.
That’s why I’m SO thrilled to share this Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe with you today. In my opinion, it’s the perfect easy everyday chocolate chip cookie recipe. This homemade recipe is simple to make and yields thick, beautiful golden brown cookies, crisp at the edges and gooey at the center.
Watch the video below to step into my kitchen and see exactly how to bake these delicious cookies with me. I give tons of tips and tricks for getting perfectly thick cookies with chocolate chunks, and you can see what every step of this recipe should look like!
There’s actually a time-lapse video shot of these cookies cooling right after I took them out of the oven. You can see that they hardly shrink or deflate as they cool. If you only beat the butter and sugar for 2 to 3 minutes max, your cookies shouldn’t deflate!
Sprinkle of Science
How to Make The Best Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies
How to Make Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies
The key to the best soft, Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies is to take the chocolate chip cookies out of the oven just before they look like they’re done baking. They should still appear slightly wet in the very center. The residual heat of the oven and pan will finish cooking the cookies through to soft perfection once you allow them to cool completely.
Also, measure your flour correctly to improve your baking forever. Too much flour will lead to dry, dense, or crumbly chocolate chip cookies that barely spread.
Why Are My Chocolate Chip Cookies Flat?
When making cookies, be sure your butter is at a cool room temperature before beating with your sugar. It shouldn’t be greasy or overly soft otherwise it’ll melt and spread the cookies too much.
The warmer your chocolate chip cookie dough is when it enters the oven, the thinner and flatter your cookies will be. To prevent flat cookies, try freezing your balls of cookie dough while your oven preheats. Learn more about how to bake THICK cookies here.
Better yet, refrigerate your chocolate chip cookie dough for 24 to 48 hours. This ‘marination’ process will transform your chocolate chip cookies by making them thicker, chewier, and more flavorful! Plus, this is a perfect way to make your delicious cookies ahead of time. Read more about the magic of chilling your cookie dough here. NOTE: chilling is OPTIONAL for this recipe but using chilled dough will enhance your cookies!
How to Make CHEWY Chocolate Chip Cookies
One of the keys to CHEWY chocolate chip cookies is to use more brown sugar than granulated sugar. The molasses in the brown sugar draws in more moisture, making the cookies thicker, softer, and chewier.
For extra chewy cookies, try adding an extra egg yolk to this recipe. You can also replace half or all of the all-purpose flour in this recipe with bread flour for an ultra-chewy bite.
How to Bake Chocolate Chip Cookies
For the BEST Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies, make the recipe below keeping these top tips in mind:
- Use a kitchen scale to measure your ingredients for the BEST most consistent results.
- Make the recipe exactly as written, without substitutions, at least the first time you bake it.
Use the correct baking pan and a spring-loaded cookie scoop for bakery-quality cookies at home. More on that below!
Why Use a Cookie Scoop?
Using a stainless steel spring-loaded cookie scoop when portioning out cookie dough is one of the KEYS to beautifully uniform, evenly-shaped, evenly-baked cookies. My cookie scoop is one of my most frequently used kitchen gadgets. A spring-loaded scoop saves you *so much time* in forming the balls of dough. When using a scoop, you ensure each ball is evenly sized so the cookies bake evenly, meaning you don’t have any small overbaked cookies or large underbaked cookies. Learn more about Cookie Scoops and how to use them here!
What’s the Difference Between Baking Soda and Baking Powder?
Baking powder and baking soda are both chemical leaveners that work to create light textures in baked goods.
Although baking powder actually contains baking soda, the two leaveners are very different. Baking powder and baking soda are not interchangeable – just take a look at the impact the type of leavener used had on each of the cookies below, and find out more in my Baking Soda vs. Baking Powder article here.
Which Baking Pan is Best for Cookies?
Take a look at the chocolate chip cookies below. These cookies are all the same batch of cookie dough, baked at the same temperature of 350°F, baked for the same amount of time of 12 minutes. The only difference? The type of baking pan used!
Check out my Best (and WORST) Baking Pans article here for more details on the science of baking pans.
How to Keep Chocolate Chip Cookies Fresh
The best cookies are the freshest, there’s no magical way around that. However, here are a few tricks to keeping them fresh and soft for as long as possible!
Can You Freeze Chocolate Chip Cookies?
I love the taste of cookies straight from the oven the best. I always keep pre-scooped balls of chocolate chip cookie dough in a resealable bag in my freezer, so I can bake cookies off and have them warm from the oven in a matter of minutes whenever I want. Here are more tips for freezing cookie dough.
But for those times when you need to keep already-baked cookies soft, see below for my tips. First of all, most cookies can be stored in an airtight container at room temp for up to 5 days. Be sure they are completely cooled before storing.
How to Keep Cookies Soft
To keep your baked chocolate chip cookies soft, you can add an apple wedge, piece of bread, or a tortilla on the top and bottom of the cookies to the container a day or two after baking them, or whenever you find the texture starting to harden. The moisture from the bread or apple will migrate to your cookies, making them soft and chewy again.
A tortilla is a favorite of mine because it takes up much less room than a slice of bread, and doesn’t transfer any flavors or aromas like an apple wedge. Not to mention, it fits into a round cookie tin pretty perfectly.
How to Refresh Stored Cookies
What I like to do is reheat and refresh the cookies in a 350°F oven for 3-5 minutes. Your toaster oven should work just fine. This improves the texture and there’s nothing like a warm chocolate chip cookie!
Tessa’s Favorite Tools for This Recipe:
- Large 3-tablespoon size cookie scoop for that bakery-style texture
- Or use a medium 1.5-tablespoon size cookie scoop and bake only for about 10-12 minutes instead
- Nordic Ware Natural Aluminum Baker’s Half Sheet won our side-by-side comparison of the best baking pans
- 12″x16″ non-stick parchment paper for the best bake and easiest cleanup!
- The Ultimate Cookie Handbook: Your Guide to Baking Perfect Cookies Every Time by Tessa Arias
More Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes:
- Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies (these are CHEWIER than this recipe)
- Coconut Oil Chocolate Chip Cookies (dairy-free)
- Browned Butter Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookies (ultra flavorful!)
- Giant Reese’s Pieces Chocolate Chip Cookies (thick and delicious!)
- Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (for serious PB lovers only!)
See ALL of my types of cookie recipes & cookie baking tips here!
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Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- 3 cups (380 grams) all-purpose flour**
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 2 sticks (227 grams) unsalted butter, at cool room temperature (67°F)
- 1/2 cup (100 grams) granulated sugar
- 1 1/4 cups (247 grams) lightly packed light brown sugar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
- 2 cups (340 grams) semisweet chocolate chips
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350ºF. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
- In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt.
- In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar until creamy, about 2 minutes. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the mixing bowl. Add the vanilla and eggs and beat until combined, scraping the bowl down as needed. Gradually beat in the flour mixture. Stir in the chocolate chips.
- If time permits, wrap dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 24 hours but no more than 72 hours. This allows the dough to “marinate” and makes the cookies thicker, chewier, and more flavorful. Let dough sit at room temperature just until it is soft enough to scoop.
- Divide the dough into 3-tablespoon sized balls using a large cookie scoop and drop onto prepared baking sheets.
- Bake for 11-13 minutes, or until golden brown. Cool for 5 minutes before removing to wire racks to cool completely.
- Although I prefer cookies fresh from the oven, these can be stored in an airtight container for up to 3 days. See post for storage tips.
Recipe Notes
Photos by Jess Larson.
Previous Baking Challenge
This recipe was one of our recent picks for the Handle the Heat Baking Challenge. Every month, we select a recipe, you make it, snap a photo, and enter to win PRIZES!
This cookie recipe is phenomenal. I first made it about a month ago and since then I’ve made it about 5 times. The real skill is knowing when they’re done. They might come out of the oven gooey, but when you leave them out on the baking rack they cool down and harden just enough. They’re always soft the next day as long as you make sure to wrap them up in plastic bags. I usually add half a cup of milk chocolate chips and half a cup of dark chocolate chips. Ugh, so good!
Add much less sugar and salt for non American taste, they turned out slightly sickly.
The texture was great. The recipe outside of the ratio of salt and sugar is good.
Thanks for your feedback, Alicja! I’m glad you enjoyed the texture of the cookies 🙂 Rather than reducing the sugar next time, I’d recommend using dark or bittersweet chocolate chips/chopped chocolate to help balance the sweetness without ruining the texture of the cookies. You can learn more about the impact sugar has on baking here 🙂 Let us know what you think with a less sweet chocolate!
Hi Tessa! I really like this recipe and I would like to use it as a base for other kind of cookies, including some other flavours you have in the blog but with different cookie base from this. I was wondering, I could I adjust this recipe depending on the flavour? I take that if it is just a matter of changing the filling (choc chips, or nuts, or M&Ms, etc) I will just swap the same grams of choc chips for other “fillings” instead?
But if I want to make peanut butter or banana cookies, I can I adjust this recipe? You remove the same QTY of butter for the QTY of peanut butter you use? Or you remove 1 egg adding the same weight in banana?
Or if I want to make a blueberry cookie, should I add fresh blueberries? Or frozen (but these could start losing water while the dough rests and mature in the fridge?)? Or dried? But at that point same grams of the choc chip or same volume (so looking at the cups instead of grams)?
It would be great to know how a base recipe could be adjusted to always get an amazing result even if the recipe with the specific flavour in not on the website yet 🙂
Thanks,
Chiara
Hi Chiara! You’ve got it—if you’re swapping out mix-ins, just keep the amount the same. Feel free to try using nuts, m&ms, or even both instead of chocolate chips. While we haven’t tested your other variation ideas, it would definitely be a fun baking experiment for you to see how they turn out! Creating a recipe from scratch or making several changes to an existing recipe is a bit complex to explain in a quick reply here, but it’s something our team would love to explore more deeply someday. Who knows, maybe Tessa will create a recipe development class in the future! 🙂 Happy baking!
Can I make this recipe in a toaster oven?
If we are using unbleached flour – how many grams do you recommend using?
Hi Lisa! I think you’ll find our recent flour experiment very interesting! Our team used bleached vs unbleached flour in our PB&J Cookies, and Tessa shared our findings here. Our team always uses Gold Medal Bleached Flour during testing, but if you only have unbleached flour, King Arthur recommends using slightly less flour (1-2 tablespoons). I hope that helps!
How many grams is 1 – 2 tablespoons? Yes, I only have unbleached. Once that is gone, I will try bleached.
Sorry I missed your response! 1 cup of all-purpose flour weighs 127 grams, so 1 tablespoon equals 8 grams.
You need to make this recipe now!! It’s amazing, truly the best bakery style cookies! Hands down!! Thank you for sharing this recipe!!
I absolutely love this recipe! I use unbleached flour and no issues with them being dry and crumbly. I just watch carefully as I add the flour and do the “stickiness” test to see if it’s in need of more flour or if it’s just right. I also use 1 cup of dark chocolate chips and 1 cup mini semi sweet chips. Makes for a yummy bit of chocolate in every bite.
I bake cookies almost everyday and these are the best chocolate chip cookies that I’ve made! Perfect crisp edges and chewy center. Flavor is perfect. Be right back…. I need to check out more of your cookie recipes!
So happy to hear that Randi! Tessa isn’t called the “Cookie Queen” for nothing haha 🙂 She even wrote an entire cookbook all about cookies! If you’re looking for something spooky this time of year, our Halloween Cookies are a reader favorite. My personal faves are our Browned Butter Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookies and our Glazed Lemon Cookies. Excited to see which recipe you make next!
The BEST recipe!! Followed it to a T!!
Great instructions! Great tips!! My son said the best he’s tasted from my kitchen!!