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: Super easy 30-minute recipe.
Why You’ll Love This Recipe: Easy, delightful chocolate chip cookie recipe. I’ve made this recipe probably 100 times always 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 three 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!
I love this time-lapse video 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!)
- Marbled Chocolate Chip Cookies (classic and double chocolate chip cookie dough in one cookie!)
- Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (for serious PB lovers only!)
See ALL of my types of cookie recipes & cookie baking tips here!
Struggling with Flat or Dry Cookies?
My free guide shows you how to fix texture problems and bake cookies you’ll love.
Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies
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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.
- Divide the dough into 3-tablespoon sized balls using a large cookie scoop and drop onto prepared baking sheets.
- If time permits, place the dough scoops into an airtight container 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. Bake from the fridge.
- 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
The Ultimate Cookie Handbook
Learn the sweet SCIENCE of cookie baking in a fun, visual way to customize your own recipes frustration-free. Plus, my best 50+ homemade cookies!
Photos by Jess Larson.
Thank you for this recipe! I’m not a professional baker but do have a reputation for baking yummy cookies. Lately, my go to chocolate chip cookie recipe has failed. I have been getting flat cookies that just crumble. Your recipe made the most delicious soft cookie with crisp edges and a chewy chocolately middle. Stellar recipe! I followed the recipe to a T and will be using this from now on.
So happy to hear that our recipe worked perfectly for you, Jana! Thanks so much for sharing 🙂
Can I use this recipe and change the add in? For example add cocoa powder to make chocolate chocolate chip cookies? Or freeze dried fruit to make fruit cookies?
Hi Anne, love the creativity! While we haven’t tested those specific variations, you’re welcome to experiment! Just keep in mind that adding cocoa powder will dry out the dough, so you’ll need to adjust the flour to keep things balanced.
Or… if you wait just a few more weeks, we might have a Double Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe coming out that you’ll LOVE! 😉
Could I use this recipe to make cookie bars?
We haven’t tried that, so I can’t say for sure if any ingredients would need to be adjusted. Feel free to give it a try and let us know how they turn out 🙂
Hey. Is there a way to store these cookies for longer?
U see… My high school is doing a science fair, and I need to start baking a couple of weeks earlier. I am planning on making 4-5 different batches and changing some of the ingredients to see the reactions to separate ingredients being changed.
Please get back to me within 1-2 weeks.
Hi Vallee, how fun—your science fair project sounds awesome! If you’re looking to store the cookies longer because of how many batches you’re baking, I’d recommend prepping the dough ahead of time. Chill it overnight in an airtight container in the fridge, then freeze the dough balls. You can bake them straight from frozen! Tessa shares tips for chilling, freezing, and baking from frozen right above the recipe, so be sure to check those out 🙂 And if you’re interested, take a peek at Tessa’s past cookie experiments in her Ultimate Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies (there’s four parts!). Let us know how it all turns out!
Thank you lots.
This is helpful!
I am still in the process of making these but I was wondering if you need to ‘marinate’ the cookie dough or not because I want my cookies as soon as possible!!!
We recommend marinating the dough overnight for best taste and texture but highly recommend baking a few right away to devour… who can resist?! 😉 Hope you enjoyed your cookies!
I found this recipe very helpful but something that could possibly make just that bit better is if it showed Celsius as well as Fahrenheit at the start!!
I agree. I just used a converter though.
Can this recipe make 20-30 cookies or will I have to double the recipe abd i also noticed that further up of the recipe theres an image of cookies with baking soda or baking powder and to me the one with both looked the best but this recipe only uses baking soda will the results be as good or how much can i put for both.
I just made this recipe and using a standard cookie scoop, I yielded 32 cookies with a single recipe.
I made these and the flavors are good but mine did not spread out an all? What could have gone wrong? I followed the recipe exactly as I am not an avid baker – any thoughts?
Thanks so much for trying the recipe, Meghan! If your cookies didn’t spread at all, it’s often due to too much flour being added—this is super common, especially when measuring by volume (cups) instead of weight. Using a digital scale really helps with accuracy! If you don’t have one, try using the spoon-and-level method next time, which we explain in detail here. Hope that helps, and we’d love to hear how your next batch turns out! 🙂
Tessa, your chocolate chip cookie recipe is absolutely THE BEST! I searched and searched and came across you making your chocolate chip cookies on a short you tube video. So I found the recipe and measured everything and my butter and eggs were the perfect room temperature and after I put all the ingredients together, in the fridge the dough went. I baked the cookies the next day and perfection came out! I ate 4 right out of the oven! Thank you, so much, for sharing this perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe.
I was looking for a cookie recipe and this one poped up. We needed to sell some cookies for a lemonade stand and this was perfect for it. People loved them as much as I did. The day after that, we made it again and it still hit the spot. I love this cookie recipe so much!!!! 😀
That’s so amazing to hear, Levi! Happy they were such a hit!
can this recipe be doubled with success?
Yep!
if the dough should marinate for 24 hours then the first instruction in the recipe shouldn’t be to preheat the oven. I preheated the oven only to realize i gotta wait before I bake these.
Hey Suz! The chill time is optional but highly recommended for best flavor and texture. The cookies will still be delish if you bake some immediately! Feel free to bake some up right away, then chill the rest overnight to compare the difference. Let us know what you think!