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.
Hi! I was wondering if you knew why my cookies flattened instead of stayed thick? They still tasted great but was curious how to get them to be thicker!
Hi Abbey! Your butter could have gotten a little too warm, and/or your leavening agents may no longer be active! Check out the pink tip box above the recipe for more info on this, and also check out Tessa’s article all about how to bake THICK cookies! 🙂
i have a question
why do you have to put the dough in the fridge and what diffrence would it make if you put it in for 2 hrs than 24 ?
Hi Nikki! Check out Tessa’s article about chilling cookie doughs here! Happy baking 🙂
Hello! I am very excited to try this recipe. I have what is probably a rather silly question, but I just want to be sure.
You say “vanilla” in your recipe, but do not state if it is vanilla extract or vanilla flavoring. I’m guessing you mean vanilla extract, but I just want to be sure.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to making these!
Amanda
Hi Amanda! Either way will work just fine, but real vanilla extract is definitely recommended for maximum deliciousness! Let us know what you think when you give these cookies a try! 🙂
Hands down!! These are THE best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever made. I’ve tried so many different cookie recipes to make the perfect cookie every single time and this one absolutely nails it. Thanks for sharing
Why preheat the oven first if you let the dough sit in the fridge for 24 hrs? Also you left out the step to mix the dry and wet ingredients. Just trying to help since the directions confused my 7 yo Daughter.
Hi Kasey! The 24-hour chill time is totally optional, so you can preheat the oven if you’re planning on making the cookies right away, as many of our readers do. The directions do mention adding the dry ingredients: “In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar until creamy, about 2 minutes. Add the vanilla and eggs. Gradually beat in the flour mixture. Stir in the chocolate chips.” I hope you and your daughter enjoyed these cookies! Happy baking! 🙂
I followed instructions exactly… I think ? Mine stayed more round and didn’t flatten. I actually tried 3 cookies 3 different ways- one more at room temp after mixing, one chilled, and one that I froze. All are ‘dome’ shapes?
Hi Renee! Cookies that don’t spread out are generally because of one specific thing: accidentally adding too much flour. 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. I hope this helps, and I hope you give these cookies another try sometime! Happy baking 🙂
I always fail at making cookies. Something about them tastes weird. I bake them too long. I bake them too short. They look kind of “off.” Holy moly. These were simple and delicious and gorgeous to boot! It’s no wonder this site has become my “go to” for desserts.
I’ve tried many chocolate chip cookie recipes and stopped trying new ones after I found this one! It’s my go to and I make it several times a month. I usually bake enough for my husband and I and freeze the rest of the dough in individual cookie portions and freeze them. When we want cookies we pop a few in the oven. Delicious!
i’ve made this recipe a couple times and they come out delishious but every time they come out not flat any tips?
Hi Sophie! It sounds like it could be your butter – it may be getting too warm before you cream with the sugars. Check out Tessa’s article here on How to Bake THICK cookies. It’s also worth checking that your leavening agents are still active – learn more about Baking Powder and Baking Soda (and how to test for freshness) here. I hope that helps! Happy baking 🙂
I followed the wisdom of the 24 hour marinating method and these are the best CC Cookies, I have ever had or made. This will be going into our family cookbook. Thank you so much for sharing!
I’ve tried a lot of chocolate chip cookie recipes just trying to get the perfect cookie . This recipe never fails me . It is the best !!!!!❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
These Bakery Chocolate Chip Cookies are the best!
Delicious!!!
Bake perfectly !
I filled some with Nutella and it was delicious.
Thank you for sharing the recipe❤️