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.
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
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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.
- 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.
Best chocolate chip cookie ever!
I made these cookies and they have great flavor, but they were all very flat. I even tried freezing them and waited to cook them again and they came out flat…
Hi Ashley! I’m sorry to hear that your cookies turned out flat. There are a few reasons why this can happen:
– 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. 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 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!
– 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, Ashley, and I hope you give these cookies another try – they’re really amazing!! For thickest, most delicious results, follow Tessa’s recommendation for chilling the dough for 24-72 hours before baking (this cannot be rushed in the freezer – learn more here). You’ll love them 🙂
My chocolate chip cookies always turned out flat and crispy. I prefer thick, crispy around the edges with a soft slightly chewy center. I’ve been searching for a recipe that would produce these results and finally my search is over! I’ve found the main “secrets”” are chilled dough and removing from the oven when they don’t look quite done. Super delicious perfection!
This is an amazing recipe!! I thought for sure it would be too much flour and not enough granulated sugar but it all balance out perfectly. I make a cookie cake with it and it was perfect!!
At what temperature and how long should I bake these on a convection oven? Thank you so much!
Hi Pn! The rule of thumb is to lower the temperature of your oven by 25°F if baking with convection (some ovens lower the temperature by this much automatically). Check for doneness at least 3/4 of the way through. Every oven is different, so exact bake times will vary. Check out Tessa’s article on ovens for more info on this, and why using an oven thermometer really help SO much with any baking or cooking! I hope this helps! Happy baking 🙂
I made these today. They are simply amazing. I will continue to make them. I followed all the directions exactly and I am so pleased they turned out so well. Thank you for a great recipe!
Listen. This is hands down THE BEST COOKIE RECIPE ON THE PLANET. When I tell you that EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I make these, I get at least 5 compliments on how delicious these cookies are. I have had so many people ask me for the recipe. It deserves an award. I have made this recipe probably at least 100 times. I listen to anything she says in her recipes because she knows what she’s doing. Spectacular baker.
The best chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever made and I have been cooking for a long time! I loved the salty/sweet ration. I am a food service manager of a large camp and will definitely add this recipe to our repertoire.
My go to recipe! Everyone loves them when I make them 🙂 Thank you for sharing! God bless 🙂
Yay! So happy to hear that, Justine!
Made them once so far and now everyone asks for the recipe! Making more today, they are perfect!
These didn’t flatten and were so dry. They taste like a scone or a biscuit and we’re such a waste. Had to throw them out because they were simply inedible. Showed my whole family and they all agreed and were disgusted by the dry texture and taste of these cookies. Don’t quite understand why this was at the top of the list on google search because these cookies are just awful.
Sorry you experienced issues with your cookies! When cookies don’t flatten and are dry, dense, or crumbly, it is because too much flour has been added to the dough. I highly encourage you to use a digital scale when measuring your ingredients, especially the flour, to ensure accuracy. It’ll improve your baking forever! Find out more details HERE. I really hope you give this recipe another try so you can enjoy the cookies the way they’re meant to taste. Please let us know how it goes if you do!
I have made this exact recipe dozens of times and they turn out amazing, every single time. I’ve even been paid to make them for friends, as well, because that’s how good this recipe is. It must be a bakers mistake honestly because I’ve never had them flat, dry, or taste like a scone or taste disgusting. I’m thinking you just need to measure properly in order for it to turn out the way they should. One pointer would be sure to use a spoon to fill each cup of flour & level with the back of a butter knife. Definitely seems like you’re using way too much flour and perhaps scooped your measurements of flour.. just a few pointers so you could maybe get it right to see how perfect this recipe truly is.
I had the same experience with the dry, unflattened, tasteless cookie. What a bummer. I’ll look into the digital scale!
LOVE this recipe! I love to double it with m&ms and freeze cookie dough for a quick weeknight cookie fix! Weighing my ingredients like a real baker has been a game changer! This is my go to favorite recipe!! Thanks so much!
Woohoo!! We’re so happy to hear that, Kat!