Tessa Arias, Chef and Cookbook Author
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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.
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:
Does it matter if the egg is cold? Should it be at room temp? Thanks for all these great tips!
It won’t be the end of the world if the egg is cold, it doesn’t have quite as much of an effect as the temperature of the butter. However, with any baking, it’s always best to use room temperature ingredients.
Question: how much weight did you gain doing this amazing fun experiment!? lol
I want to go bake them ALL and taste the difference!!
Thank you sooo much for all your investigation. It has made this expats stay abroad so much easier with a dependable comfortfood recipe. Good vibes and eats to your excellent website.
This guide to chocolate chip cookies is AWESOME! I always let my butter go to room temp (the eggs as well), and I use more brown sugar than white sugar.
Thanks so much for this experiment!! I have been in the quest for my favorite ccc recipe for years. This weekend I chilled my dough overnight for the first time and it was impossible to portion out the next day because it was so hard! Should I portion before chilling? Or should I let it soften out of the fridge before scooping? Thanks for your help!!
Yep, just let it sit at room temperature until it’s soft enough to scoop.
Thanks! I have been making (too) many delicious cookies lately. I’ve had the best luck with the “both” recipe using frozen chocolate chips and lining the pan with a thin coating of melted butter instead of parchment paper. It makes for crispier edges while keeping the centres gooey.
Just found this today – we are doing a cookie unit in my Foods 1 class now and cannot WAIT to have my kids compare different way to make chocolate chip cookies!! Thanks!
Amazing CC review. I am a bit of a perfectionist in the cooking department, been looking for a long time a certain kind of cookie and would love some help. I would like the cookie to not spread so much (as I read more flour) but denser and thick, very tall and find gooyness in the center but crispyness on the edges. The ones I have tried spreads too much and stays very thin. Is that kind of cookie I’m searching is imposible, easy or a very good challenge? What king of proportions am I looking for? Thanks!
Please guide me. 🙂 The cookies look delicious.
I bake them and they always seem to turn into paper thin, rock hard, “frisbees”. They are hard to scrap off the pan and not very good so I end up saying forget it and throw them away. I follow the recipe on the package, look up recipes on line for simple chocolate chip cookies, changed the cooking time and temperature, and have even tweeked the recipe like you have done. Nothing seems to change though. I feel like why bother spending the time/money when I can buy a box and be done. Then I have someone else bake them, bring them over, and they are perfect. Why do mine always turn out like this?
I even tried the full sheet pan recipe like my mother in law makes thinking that might work better and they turn out like a cake/brownie thickness and texture. Then the edges burn, instead of getting crispy corners everyone fights over. I’m not an expert in the kitchen, but can bake many things that come out great. Why are my cookies such a disappointment ???
What kind of pan are you using? Avoid anything nonstick or really thin. Also avoid using nonstick cooking spray. I like to use high-quality Chicago Metallic half sheet pans. Additionally, your oven may need to be calibrated. An oven thermometer can make a world of difference! Many ovens can be off 25°F, even 50°F.
Although I appreciated the detail in your article a lot, concerning what to expect if using more or less sugar/butter/flour etc., I must tell you that when I actually made the recipe, I was disappointed to find that the cookies tasted very, well, not-sweet shall we say. So I went back to check your recipe and I see that you have made errors in your conversions from cups to ounces. As I am in Europe and thus using weight measurement devices, I paid particular attention to following your notes, such as that 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of all purpose flour equals 5 ounces or 142 grams. I followed this same formula in converting the other dry ingredients, namely sugar. But as I later discovered – a “cup” of dry ingredients is actually much closer to 8 ounces/200 – 220 grams (some sugars are sweeter and heavier). I am not sure why making this same mistake on flour and sugar would result in not-sweet cookies, if the error applies to both ingredients then one would think the proportion would be the important thing, but I am telling you that these cookies did not taste great even though I used all top quality ingredients. I think it is better to use really precise measurements in a baking recipe, not cups and teaspoons but actual weights. Thanks.
Diana – if I am understanding you, applying the same weight measurement conversion for sugar as was listed for flour is entirely incorrect. Flour and sugar do not weigh the same. If you measured 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of lead, would it weigh the same? No, and that applies to all dry ingredients. A cup of flour is about 125 grams whereas a cup of granulated sugar is about 200 grams, and that can vary depending on the brand and variety as you mentioned. All across the internet there are some great conversion calculators that can convert specific baking ingredients from a variety of volume and weight measurements. I’d recommend using that in the future when following American recipes. Additionally, as the majority of my readers are American and use volume measurements, that is always going to be my primary unit of measure, with weights given in baking recipes often. I hope this cleared up your confusion.
Easy & quick, tasty & sweat … what more can you possibly want? Ultimate CC cookies on the way 🙂