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In this post I’m going to share with you how various ingredients and techniques can affect the taste, texture, and appearance of your chocolate chip cookies. This will hopefully help you understand how a Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe works so you can make the PERFECT batch every time, whatever you consider to be perfect. This information will allow you to alter or create your own chocolate chip recipe that produces cookies just the way YOU like them. You’ll be an expert on the anatomy of the chocolate chip cookie.
I used the Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe as my control and made little changes and variations in techniques and ingredients to show you how they affect the cookie.
I halved and adapted the original Tollhouse recipe. I kept everything the same through each recipe test, changing just one key thing to see its effect and photographing the results for you.
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Cookie Tools and Ingredients Used:
Tools and Ingredients Used (when applicable):
-Spring-Loaded Cookie Scoop (Medium or 1 1/2-Tablespoon size)
–Chicago Metallic sheet pans
–Escali Digital Food Scale
–KitchenAid 5-quart Stand Mixer
–Oven thermometer
–Unbleached parchment paper
-Gold Medal All-Purpose Flour
-Fine sea salt
-Light brown sugar
-Large eggs
-Unsalted butter at a cool room temperature
Control Recipe
Ingredients:
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (142 grams) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (75 grams) granulated sugar
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (75 grams) packed light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 large egg
1 cup (170 grams) semi sweet chocolate chips
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line baking sheets with nonstick baking mats or 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. Add the egg and vanilla, beating well to combine. Gradually beat in the flour mixture. Stir in the chocolate chips. Scoop 1 1/2 tablespoon-sized balls and place onto prepared baking sheets.
Bake for 9 to 11 minutes, or until golden brown. Cool for 2 minutes before removing to wire racks to cool completely.
Here is the control, an adapted version of the Nestle Tollhouse recipe. The full recipe I used to base all of the tweaks on is at the bottom of this post.
Baking Powder:
Removed baking soda from recipe and used 1/2 teaspoon baking powder. This produced results that were more cakey and puffed while baking.
Baking Powder AND Baking Soda:
Used 1/4 teaspoon baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. This produced results that were crisp at the edges, soft in the middle, with a good amount of spread. The combination of the two leaveners produced the best results in my opinion.
MORE Flour:
Increased the flour to 2 cups (250 grams) which created a more crumbly dough and very little spread. The cookies were small yet thick and relatively undercooked (ooey and gooey) in the middle.
MELTED Butter:
I replaced the room temperature butter with melted and cooled butter. Instead of creaming the butter and sugar with an electric mixer, I simply stirred the butter and sugars together then let sit for 5 minutes, until the sugar was better absorbed by the butter. This produced flatter cookies that had a shiny, crackled top reminiscent of brownies. They were also more crisp at the edges.
All Granulated Sugar:
I used 3/4 cup granulated sugar (150 grams) in this recipe which produced flat, white, chewy, and slightly crunchy cookies but with little flavor. Since baking soda (called for in the control recipe) requires an acid (such as brown sugar) to react, these cookies fell very flat as you can see by the way the chocolate chips protrude.
All Brown Sugar:
I used 3/4 cup (150 grams) packed light brown sugar in this recipe which produced thick, brown, and soft cookies with an intense butterscotch flavor. The original control recipe uses an even ratio of granulated and brown sugars. If you prefer your cookies to be flatter, chewier, or crisper, use more granulated sugar. If you prefer your cookies to be softer and thicker and have a pronounced butterscotch flavor, use more brown sugar.
24-hour CHILLED Dough:
I used the control recipe but chilled it in the fridge for about 24 hours before shaping and baking. This produced cookies that were slightly thicker, chewier, darker, and with a better depth of butterscotch flavor. If you have time, try chilling your next cookie dough for at least 24 hours, or up to 48 hours.
Final Comparison:
So my cookies are crumbly, but I used Crisco butter shortening for it and followed the directions on the back of the chocolate chip bag. nestle of course. but they crumbled. help
this is one of the best posts EVER. anywhere. thank you! 🙂
CHocolate chip cookies
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I love cookies (especially chocolate chip) and I am in LOVE with this post!! Definitely trying the more flour and the more brown sugar options. I’m curious, instead of butter have you ever tried the recipe with Crisco?
Check out PART 2 where I test things like cake flour, bread flour, shortening, cornstarch, and nonstick baking pans: https://handletheheat.com/2013/08/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-part-2.html
I usually use dark brown sugar, and use more of that than the white sugar. Is there a reason you don’t use dark brown sugar?
Hi Tessa, A friend liked your page on FB and it caught my attention. I’ve been baking cookies on and off for about 30 years now. I got back into it about 15 years ago to share with my co-workers and make people at work smile. Somehow in the process I think I made cookie addicts out of a large portion of the people I made them for. I started off religiously following the Nestle Toll House Recipe on the back of the package of the chips. Then I decided I really wasn’t happy with it so I started experimenting. I’ll share a few of my test results.
1. Double the chips. I never had enough chips in my cookies. So I just doubled the number of chips in my cookies. The upside was people LOVED them. The down side was that you ended up with cookies with giant clumps of chips in them. I still use the Nestle chips, but they saved me when I found the mini chips. Now the cookies have double the chips but no more clumps of melted chips in them.
2. I thought how about a “slightly” healthier cookie? I switched from Betty Crocker All Purpose Bleached Flour to Betty Crocker Whole Wheat Flour. The color of the dough and the cookies turned a little darker. The flavor did not change at all. The texture of the cookies became slightly courser when eating them.
3. My learned lesson about butter. I was always in a rush to get things done and didn’t wait for the butter to soften. When I took the butter straight from the fridge to the bowl, I ended up with cookies that looked like the “more flour” cookies in your image. When I let the butter soften I am now getting a mix of “both” to “melted butter”…
It’s always funny when people ask me for my cookie recipe and I tell them just follow the recipe on the bag, and double the chips. I use pure vanilla and un-salted butter and the wheat flour. Now I only use the mini-chips though. They still can’t believe I am following the recipe.
Cool! Back in 8th grade, I messed with chocolate chip cookies for my science fair project. I did things such as doubling or removing ingredients. I remember that double eggs was preferred over the control recipe! Double vanilla was pretty good too, but so was removing the vanilla. Double brown sugar was baaaad!
Hi!You should try using cream of tartar..it leaves the cookies w/ those fabulous crackles across the top.(It is an ingredient of baking powder)..I use
1C white sugar
1C brown sugar
1C butter
2eggs
1tsp vanilla
1tsp baking soda
1tsp cream of tartar
1/2tsp salt (I use salted butter)
3C flour..bake 9 min @350
I make the variation with both baking powder and baking soda AND put the dough in the fridge for 24 hours. The best ever!! AND I never bake on humid or rainy days (the weather affects my baking as we live in a 100+ year old farm house that “breathes” – no central A/C to control humidity)
If I only have salted butter do I omit the 1/2 tsp that it calls for in the recipe?
My cookies always come out like the top row #2 from left. Now I know why. It seems to me that the best cookie might be made with brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, then frozen and thawed before cooking. How about one made with all Splenda? How would that work?
Thank you so much for the cookie guide. This comes at a perfect time because lately my chocolate chip cookies have been coming out flat. The kids said the cookies don’t look good but they taste great. I have been making cookies for over 40yrs and this is the first time this has happened, now I know what to do. Thanks again.