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.
This post may contain affiliate links. Read our disclosure policy.
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.
What Makes Cookies Chewy, Crisp, or Cakey?
My free guide reveals the ingredients and tweaks that matter.
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!
Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies
Email This Recipe
Enter your email, and we’ll send it to your inbox.
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
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.
I made a double batch of these cookies. Oh man, what a hit!!
Hi Bruce! So glad to hear this! Thanks so much for the review!
Such a nostalgic cookie! They have the perfect taste. Chewy but the edges are nice and crisp!
Happy to hear that, Amy!
My family’s favorite CCC recipe!
Yay!! So thrilled to hear that 🙂
Terrible. Came out completely flat and still raw in the middle.
Hi Paul! Oh no, it sounds like something definitely went wrong in the process of making these cookies! Here are a few things that may help next time:
– 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 flour/sugar/etc and throw off the entire chemistry of a recipe. Tessa talks about how to best measure ingredients to ensure accuracy every time, 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!
– Was your dough chilled before it went into the oven? If you live somewhere hot, this is even more important – but here at Handle the Heat, we wholeheartedly believe that well-chilled doughs make for much better cookies. 24-72 hours in the fridge is ideal to develop maximum flavor and consistency, but even an hour or two can prevent your cookies from becoming sad puddles if your kitchen is very warm! Read more about the science behind this here, in Tessa’s article about chilling cookie dough!
– I just want to mention your leavening agent. If your baking/soda powder are not fresh, they won’t do their jobs and your baked goods can not rise properly, fall after baking, and much more. Tessa talks about the science behind leavening agents, and how to test for leavener freshness, in this article here!
Hopefully something here helped! Feel free to reach back out to us with any further questions – we are always happy to help!! 🙂
Yum! Tessa’s brown butter toffee cookies are my first love but these are a close second! Delicious and so quick to pull together.
Yay!! So happy to hear these are still a hit, Sarah!
I love these cookies! I usually make them as M&M cookies that are colored for whatever the season is but I also used this as a base for a giant cookie cake that came out absolutely delicous! These come together super quick and they’re really easy to make, I highly recommend giving them a go!
The best Chocolate Chip Cookies. Granddaughter and I made them tonight and they were a huge hit.
The cookies are soft, gooey and delicious – a winning recipe.
These are always a hit!
I love these so much! One of my favourite recipes of yours!
I have tried marinating the whole mass of dough and it never seems to work out for me. I have trouble getting the dough to room temperature, and when I THINK I do, I still find it difficult to scoop the dough. Also, won’t the dough start getting too warm in between batches? I can only bake one tray at a time, and I’m thinking that putting the dough back in the fridge between batches to avoid this will end up making the dough too cold again. Even though the mass marination method is recommended, I’ve found that just chilling dough balls is much easier. Do you have any suggestions on how to get this to work for me?
Hi Jessica! As long as your pre-scooped dough malls are well-sealed in a ziptop bag or an airtight container, it’s totally fine to scoop, then marinate, then bake or freeze. You do run the risk of the dough balls drying out faster using this method, but as long as they are well sealed and protected from the dryness of the fridge, you should be just fine! It’s definitely easier this way 🙂 I hope this helps! Happy baking 🙂
Thanks! I have a follow-up question that is kind of related and was part of the reason I was thinking of trying to do the mass chilling again. There are times when I bake chilled balls and they don’t seem to spread very much…I end up with the dreaded little hockey puck mounds and/or burnt cookies. I’m pretty sure I’m weighing the flour correctly. Do you think this could be due to the balls being too cold? I know many people bake directly from the freezer to the oven so that doesn’t sound like it would make a difference, but watching them bake, something just seems off.
Hi Jessica! Hmm, that’s so strange! It definitely shouldn’t be anything to do with the your dough being too cold if your dough balls are just cold and not frozen. I have a couple thoughts as to what could be happening.
– You said you’re weighing the flour – are you weighing all your ingredients, or just the flour? Are you using a digital scale?
– Your oven might be running a little hot. Do you have an oven thermometer to check that? Check out Tessa’s article here about ovens, full of tips!!
– How old is your leavening agent? If your baking/soda powder are not fresh, they won’t do their jobs and your baked goods can not rise and spread properly, among other things. Tessa talks about the science behind leavening agents, and how to test for leavener freshness, in this article here!
– What type of pan are you baking on? Different materials of pans conduct heat differently, so some will cook the bottom super quickly, and not leave the cookie appropriate time to spread out gently and evenly. Tessa discusses and shows the differences between a variety of baking pans, and indicates her favorites, in this article here!
Hopefully something here helps figure out your issue, Jessica! Feel free to reach back out to us with any further questions – we are always happy to help!! 🙂
Hi there! To answer your questions.
1. Yes, I am weighing all of my ingredients on a digital scale. I know that sometimes too much flour can be a culprit, so that’s why I specifically mentioned it.
2. I use an oven thermometer.
3. Leavening agents could be the problem. I don’t think they are as fresh as they should be, so I could try the test. My baking soda is new, but my baking powder is a little past the expiration date.
4. I bake on the pan that Tessa uses.
So, I guess the culprit could be the leavening agents. I’ve read the tips and know freshness is important, but I don’t bake a LOT and am guilty of not replacing them like I should because don’t like to throw them away if I still have quite a bit left. And my oven…I’ve been wondering if doing a periodic oven check is a good idea as well, just in case there’s been a change?
Alright, thank you so much for all of the ideas! It sounds like the fixes might not be too difficult.
Fingers crossed that’s the culprit, Jessica!! Good luck 🙂
some talk about marinating the cookie dough balls? what is that? thank you, making now
Hi Mark! This refers to the chill time, where you rest the cookie dough for 24-72 hours for the cookies to develop flavor and more! Details can be found in the pink tip box, above the recipe! Happy baking 🙂
My family absolutely loves this cookie recipe. I’ve made it about 4 times and it’s so yummy. I switched it up this last batch and added pecans, chocolate chips and marshmallows. Highly recommend this recipe!
What a fun switch-up, Tina! So glad you and your family enjoy these cookies 🙂