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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 chocolate chip cookie recipes work 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 one key thing to see its effect and photographing the results for you. Be sure to check out my free Cookie Customization Guide to truly perfect your cookies!
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.
THANK YOU! Thanks for sharing (in clarity and with detail) this information. SO useful in getting to the heart of the specific and obscure problem with my mealy / cake-y / corn-y chocolate chip cookies (so different from my grandmother’s gold-standard). Much appreciated, P
Hi Tessa, Your website is excellent! I have been trying for years to bake thin, moist, chewy Toll House cookies and have tried so many ingredient variations, I’ve lost count. My cookies puff up, are hard, and are unappealing. I appreciate your recipe alterations to indicate what modifications bring about certain cookie textures. Other than ingredient variations, I’m curious, do you feel that the OVEN itself (gas or electric) has a bearing on the cookies? We have a typical ELECTRIC oven and my neighbor bakes exactly the Toll House cookies I’m hoping for (flat and chewy) with a GAS oven. Are gas stoves providing more “moist” heat that also helps cookies spread? If so, could I ever replicate this perhaps with a pan of steaming water on the bottom shelf of the oven?
Also, nowadays, “convection” ovens are very popular. I’m so determined to get the cookies my family loves that I’m wondering if I should replace our semi-old stove! Thank you for any thoughts you can offer on ovens…I’m going to keep trying.
I tried the 1/2 baking soda 1/2 baking powder recipe but my cookies look like the “more flour” example. Does anyone have thoughts on what I might’ve done one with wrong? 🙁
This is by far the most comprehensive post like this that I’ve ever seen and as a cookie lover, I just had to bookmark this! Thank you! 🙂
Julia
This is a great study!!! Thank you so much for taking the time to do this!! One important thing – the tollhouse recipe bakes at 375°. If you bake them at 350° the sugar will never caramelize, so the cookies will be very different. (However, baking them at a lower temperature probably made some of the differences between the batches more pronounced.)
I enjoyed your break down so much. Now I know why my cookies always came out all fluffy.lol.now time to get in the kitchen and try something new.. thank you.
Your Blog is very informative. Straight to the point(about a number of things).
One of the best I’ve seen.
So very well scientifically researched & tested (no guessing-real results).
Keep Up the good work .
Look forward to trying other recepies.
“The cookies are just one of my favorites”.
Thanks for the research & your thought experience about the whole thing,..you make it a whole lot easier to enjoy baking cookies for people & the ones you love.
I live in Denver…baking in high altitude is always a challenge. I try every recipe ingredient/heat adjustment I find but cookies still rise and collapse into thin cookies. Suggestions?
I remembered this guide when I found your snowflake sugar cookies last year .(my favorite cookie recipe by the way) but was going for simple this year so made till house and snickerdoodles both were a disaster. Got hard as rock chunks. I am a true believer that baking is a science and cooking is an art. In both recipes I wanted thin crispy edges somewhat chewy middles with a good spread. Do you think both baking powder and soda in both recipes would achieve that?
I enjoyed your break down so much. Now I know why my cookies always came out all fluffy.lol.now time to get in the kitchen and try something new.. thank you.
Hi
Love the guide,
How many dozen cookies did the control recipe make?
Thanks
Brooke
Great site and great experiments with these cookies! I’ll try some variations.
My mother made toll house cookies using the basic recipe, and we all loved them. Because she used an ungreased baking sheet as called for in the earliest recipes, the cookies would change shape a bit when she slid them off of the hot baking sheet; they took on a more oval shape–which we came to accept as part of the cookie. I still like them this way so I don’t let them “rest” but slide them off the sheet right away.