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!
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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!
How to Make The Best Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies
How to make soft chocolate chip cookies:
The key to the best soft 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 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 beautiful, uniform, evenly-shaped and 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!
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!
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.
Photos by Jess Larson.
BAKERY STYLE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES MADE BY OUR COMMUNITY
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Not to good, very dry and flavourless, they didn’t flatten out or grow they just seemed to get dry somehow and everything was according to the recipe
Don’t recomend
Hi Easton! I’m sorry to hear that these cookies didn’t turn out quite as they should! Here are a few common issues that may have unfortunately gone wrong here:
– How do you measure your ingredients? By volume (using cups), or by weight (using a digital kitchen scale)? When measuring by volume, it’s so easy to mis-measure ingredients (particularly flour) and throw off the entire chemistry of a recipe – resulting in lackluster cookies without much flavor and don’t spread in the oven. Check out Tessa’s article here, where she talks about how to best measure ingredients to ensure accuracy every time.
– How old are your leavening agents? If your baking soda/powder (soda in this case) are not fresh, they won’t do their jobs and your baked goods can fail to spread, fall after baking, and much more. Baking powder/soda can also lose their effectiveness long before the expiration date on the packaging. Tessa talks about the science behind leavening agents, and how to test for leavener freshness, in this article here!
– Another thing could be how long you creamed your butter and sugars together for, and how warm your butter was at this time. Both have a huge impact on a cookie’s outcome. Have a look at this article, where Tessa discusses both and the repercussions on the resulting baked goods!
I hope something here helps, Easton, and I hope you’ll give these cookies another try sometime – they really are incredible!! Best of luck and happy baking 🙂
Everything was brand new and I was using a kitchen scale not measuring cups. I do have a baking background and I am very educated when it comes to cookies. There was a flaw somewhere in the recipe because I tried again even with different brands than before and a separate oven but still the same outcome. Thanks for the feedback trying to help can obviously be challenging online not face to face but it was better than what most other creators do to the smaller bakers we may know like tell them they were outright doing everything wrong!
Hi again Easton! Thanks for clarifying how you made this recipe and ruling out those potential errors. With those factors ruled out, I’m honestly not sure what happened here. Our team members all live in very different climates across the US, and the recipe works perfectly for us time and time again, so we know this is a solid recipe – but I’m sorry it didn’t work for you! I hope you have better luck next time. Thanks so much for giving this recipe a try, and Happy Baking!
Awesome! I grew up baking with gluten free ingredients because my mom is allergic to gluten, but I decided to slice things up this time and bake cookies on my own with gluten. I was not sure what recipe to use, but I trusted this one and it turned out awesome! The dough left an amazing aroma around the house and my brother and dad loved it. 10/10!! I will definitely let all my baker friends know about this gem of a recipe. <3
This recipe sounds great! I can’t wait to try it. Can I substitute whole wheat flour for a portion (not all) of the all-purpose flour?
Hi Elise! We haven’t tried that, so we can’t say for sure – but whole wheat flours tend to absorb more liquid than white flours, so this would take some tinkering. Feel free to experiment and let us know how it goes 🙂
Loved this recipe!!!!! I defiantly would make it again!!! Easy to follow, and great for beginner baker.
Great recipe ! The best I’ve followed n mastered. I even did a couple of s’mores cookies .
Woohoo! So glad to hear this, Kristian! Your cookies look great!! 🙂
Absolutely lovely! Thank you. I’m a baker and needed a new recipe that could stand up to the rest of my products. This nailed it! I followed the recipe to a T. I let the dough chill overnight, but not 24 hours.
Baked on a silicone mat on a black n decker pink cooking sheet pan for 11 min at 350°F. I used a medium cookie scoop, and overfilled it. I weighed each ball of dough and they were about 55 grams each. Saved a few chocolate chips to pop in the top of each ball just before baking.
Woohoo! So glad to hear that you enjoyed this recipe! Your cookies look fabulous 🙂
Loved these!
I make these often. It’s a great recipe. I never leave the dough to rest like it’s suggested (kids don’t want to wait) but they still come out delicious and gooey.
I absolutely love these cookies! So perfect! I followed the instructions everything to a T the only thing was that I used salted butter instead of unsalted, so I took out the sea salt. I baked a couple of the cookies immediately to try it out. It tasted very floury, however I did let the rest of the dough marinate overnight. The cookies were so perfect! My boyfriend/future husband at the rest of them, and my roommates were upset lol. I’m definitely going to make a bunch of dough and freeze it. I think I’ll add my own twist to it for next time, thank you so much! I would take a picture, but everyone ate them lol. These cookies last a lot longer than she mentions, yes they get a little stiff but throw them in the conventional oven or microwave for a couple of seconds and they’re almost the way they were before! These are so much better than store bought cookies.
I made these cookies and used my small cookie scoop and I managed to get 80 cookies. They are delicious and will be making them again! I also used the mini chocolate chips in the recipe.
Can’t wait to try this recipe. Does it matter if I use mini chocolate chips instead of regular? I happen to have the mini chips on hand so I thought I’d give them a try, but wondering if it will change the results at all? Also, I think I am leaving my butter out to soften too long, so now I’m going to try to get it to 67° as recommended. Thanks!
Mini chips will work just fine 🙂 Let us know how it goes, Deb!
I am a baker and my search for the best chocolate chip cookie recipe is FINALLY over after testing many different recipes for years. THIS IS IT. I made some changes however, just for personal preference and I am just wowed. My suggestion is use a scale, this will ensure recipe is how it should be. Thank you!