Your outdoor grill should be an extension of your indoor kitchen. Anything you can bake in your indoor kitchen oven – casseroles, pies, brownies, pizza, coffee cake — can be baked on a gas or charcoal grill, and you don’t need to adjust the recipes.
The key is to always use top-quality ingredients as they’ll result in a better cookie; it really is that simple.
- Always use butter.
- Choose the right sugar.
- Choose the right flour.
- Check your flour is in date.
- Choose the right kind of chocolate.
- Cream the butter and sugar.
- Beat in the eggs.
- Fold in the flour.
Tips for getting that perfect cookie texture
- If you want chewy cookies, add melted butter. Butter is 20 percent water.
- If you want thin, candy-like cookies, add more sugar.
- If you want cakey cookies, add more eggs.
- If you want an open, coarse crumb and craggy top, add baking soda.
Oven Temperature
Generally, cookies are baked in a moderate oven — 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) — for 8 to 12 minutes, depending on the size of the cookie. For chewy cookies, allow them to cool on the baking sheet for 3 to 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.
Double Your Yolks Most cookie recipes call for at least one egg. You can try omitting the white of each egg, which tends to dry out when baked, and replacing it with an additional yolk Plus, egg yolks have more fat than egg whites, which helps to keep your cookies moist and chewy.
Baking cookies quickly in a hot oven – at 375 degrees F as opposed to a lower temperature – will make for soft results. They’ll bake fast instead of sitting and drying out in the oven’s hot air. Ever so slightly underbaking your cookies will give you softer results than cooking them the full amount the recipe says.
Normally the cookie should not be too flat – should be rounded in the middle, should snap if it’s crispy or bend and break if it’s chewy. If it has nuts, there should be enough of them to have a piece in every bite. The cookies should be big enough to get a good taste of the cookie but not so big that it’s a full meal.
Using lower-moisture sugar (granulated) and fat (vegetable shortening), plus a longer, slower bake than normal, produces light, crunchy cookies. That said, using a combination of butter and vegetable shortening (as in the original recipe), or even using all butter, will make an acceptably crunchy chocolate chip cookie.
Chilling cookie dough controls spread.
Chilling cookie dough before baking solidifies the fat in the cookies. As the cookies bake, the fat in the chilled cookie dough takes longer to melt than room-temperature fat. And the longer the fat remains solid, the less cookies spread.
Why Do Cookies Get Hard? Like all baked treats, cookies are subject to getting stale. Over time, the moisture in the cookies evaporates, leaving them stiff and crumbly. It’s the same thing that happens to breads, muffins, and other baked goods.
The simple answer to this question is, meet in the middle. Cookies should (almost) always be baked on the middle rack of the oven. The middle rack offers the most even heat and air circulation which helps cookies bake consistently.
Cookie temperatures fluctuate, with some recipes as low as 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and a few as high as 425 degrees Fahrenheit, but most recipes land on 375 or 350 to evenly bake the entirety of the cookie.
1. Definitely heat from the bottom but bake on the center rack. Place a thermometer inside the oven to check that the temperature is accurate–home ovens can be off by 50 degrees or more, making a huge difference for cookies. 350 degrees Fahrenheit is a good temp for chocolate chip cookies.
Adding more moisture to your dough in the form of extra butter, egg yolks, or brown sugar will make your cookies even softer. We go into even more detail on how to achieve chewy perfection here.
Yolks, where all of the fat is in an egg, increase richness, tenderness and flavor. Therefore, if you put an extra egg, you will get a chewier cookie. I do it all the time. If you put less, you will get a more crumbly cookie.
Vinegar is a surprisingly common ingredient in baked goods, considering that it has such a sharp flavor. But as an acid, vinegar is often included in cake and cookie batters to react with baking soda and start the chemical reaction needed to produce carbon dioxide and give those batters a lift as they bake.
9 Tips to Remember
- Use Real Butter and Keep It Cool. The low melting point of butter may be what makes your cookies flat.
- Use Shortening.
- Chill Dough Twice.
- Use Parchment Paper or a Silicone Liner.
- Measure Precisely.
- Use Fresh Baking Soda.
- Use Optional Add-Ins.
- Buy an Oven Thermometer.
If your cookies are rock hard, the site explains that it’s likely due to an over-abundance of sugar, which hardens, darkens, and flattens the cookies as they bake. Bake or Break adds that over-mixing your dough can be the culprit, too. When flour is blended with other ingredients, gluten starts to form.
Carbon dioxide gas and water vapor form the bubbles which make cookies rise. Rising doesn’t just make cookies taller. It also opens up space to keep the cookie from becoming too dense. Salt slows down the decomposition of baking soda, so the bubbles don’t get too big.
Egg yolks are high in fat in relation to the egg white which is high in protein so often acts as a binder. Adding egg yolks to the cookies yields a super tender, chewy cookie.
Eggs add structure, leavening, color, and flavor to our cakes and cookies. It’s the balance between eggs and flour that help provide the height and texture of many of the baked goods here on Joy the Baker. It’s a balancing act. Different parts of the egg pull the weight in different ways.
Open up the oven, pull out the rack a bit, and push the sides of the cookie very lightly with a spatula or your finger. If the edge stays firm and doesn’t fall inwards, then your cookies are done. If you leave a noticeable indention, then your cookies likely need a few minutes more in the oven.
The most common cause is using a different flour than usual, such as cake flour, and measuring flour with too heavy a hand. Using larger eggs than called for can make cookies cakey, as will the addition of milk or more milk or other liquids than specified.
For softer, chewier cookies, you will want to add much less granulated sugar, slightly more brown sugar, and a fair bit less butter. For cakey cookies, you will often be including even less butter and sugar.
On ungreased cookie sheet, drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls about 2 inches apart. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until light brown (centers will be soft). Cool 1 to 2 minutes; remove from cookie sheet to wire rack.
Water vapor escaping from the dough in combination with the carbon dioxide released by our baking soda is ultimately what makes our cookies light and airy.
Let it sit for long enough—the famous Jacques Torres chocolate chip cookie, published in the New York Times, mandates a rest of at least 24 hours and up to 72—and the starches and proteins in the flour begin to break down, leading to more browning and caramelization.
Pastry Flour: An unbleached flour made from soft wheat, with protein levels somewhere between cake flour and all-purpose flour (8 to 9 percent). Pastry flour strikes the ideal balance between flakiness and tenderness, making it perfect for pies, tarts and many cookies.
This will prevent you from packing in too much flour, and using more than what the recipe calls for.
- Using a warm baking sheet.
- Not enough space between cookies.
- Overbaking.
- Wrong oven temperature.
- Not rotating the baking sheet.
- Not enough greasing/Not using parchment paper.
- Removing cookies before they’re completely cooled.
The best way to soften cookie dough is by leaving it in a warm place such as near a hot stove or under a lamp. Other methods for softening cookie dough include using a hot water bath, microwaving it on very low power, hitting it with a rolling pin, and cutting it into smaller pieces.
Even heat created by the air circulating in convection yields the irresistible combination of crunchy and gooey – and some say it’s the secret to the perfect cookie. But, if you prefer a softer, chewy cookie, use Bake mode without convection.
Preheat oven 10 to 15 minutes before baking the first sheet or pan of cookies. Check oven temperature with an oven thermometer.
If you absolutely need to bake more than one batch at a time for an event, holiday baking, etc– rotate the baking sheets from the top rack to bottom rack once halfway through the baking process.
In Closing
Bake them at 350 degrees if you want a crispy texture. Bake them at a lower temperature, such as 325 degrees, if you want a chewy texture.
“When you bake at a lower temperature, you will get that perfect cookie with a soft center and crisp exterior,” she adds. Just make sure you increase baking time by a couple of minutes or you will end up with gooey underbaked cookies.
Place one baking sheet at a time onto center rack of preheated 350 degree F oven. Bake until cookies are golden around the edges, still have pale tops, and are soft in the center, about 8 to 10 minutes. (Do not overbake!
Problem #4: Pale and soft cookies
These biscuits aren’t hard to identify from the batch. They were probably baked from a good consistency dough but ended up a bit under baked and raw on the inside. Either the oven temperature is too low or they were taken out too soon.
Melted butter is best suited for drop doughs such as chocolate chip, peanut butter, and sugar cookies, as well as most cookie bars. You can usually adapt recipes that don’t originally call for melted butter to use this technique if you’re looking for an even fudgier texture.
Your Butter Came Straight From the Fridge
This relates to the issue of creaming, because cold butter is more difficult to cream. Thus, if your butter is too cold, your cookies will be denser, and they will likely not spread enough in the pan when you bake them. In general, you want your butter to be cool, but not cold.
Why This Happened: Melting the butter first means it will mix more easily with the flour making the gluten form more than softened butter. More gluten = more chew. So a melted butter cookie will have a bit more chew. But they will spread more since the butter was already a liquid.
Milk performs many functions in your baked goods. It serves as a source of liquid to hydrate the dry ingredients, adds flavor, supports browning and softens texture.
Adding eggs, one at a time
They should be added one at a time, each one thoroughly beaten in before the next is added, to allow the creamed butter/sugar mixture to most effectively retain its trapped air. Be sure to scrape the sides of the bowl so all of the butter/sugar mixture is incorporated.
Brown sugar, meanwhile, is dense and compacts easily, creating fewer air pockets during creaming—that means that there’s less opportunity to entrap gas, creating cookies that rise less and spread more. With less moisture escaping via steam, they also stay moist and chewy.
When added to cake, cookie and shortbread recipes, cornstarch helps create a crumbly and tender dessert-like texture. Commercially, cornstarch is often used as an anti-caking agent.
Which vinegar is best for baking?
The most common type of vinegar for baking is plain white vinegar. It has a mild, uncomplicated flavour. Another one is cider vinegar, which is made from fermenting apples. This has a slightly sweeter flavour than white vinegar.
Is baking powder the same as baking soda?
The bottom line
While both products appear similar, they’re certainly not the same. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, which requires an acid and a liquid to become activated and help baked goods rise. Conversely, baking powder includes sodium bicarbonate, as well as an acid. It only needs a liquid to become activated.
Baking soda encourages spreading while baking powder puffs the cookies up. If your recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, you would use 3 to 4 teaspoons of baking powder.
“Most people think the butter should be so soft that it’s broken down, but the most important thing is that you want a little bit of give to the butter.” If you want to get technical, she says the precise temperature should be between 63 and 68 degrees — where it’s cool to touch, but your finger can leave an indent.
Generally for 1 or 2-inch-deep pans, you will fill them 1/2 full of batter. For pans that are 3 or 4-inch-deep, the batter needs to be about 2/3 full.
Baking soda is typically used for chewy cookies, while baking powder is generally used for light and airy cookies. Since baking powder is comprised of a number of ingredients (baking soda, cream of tartar, cornstarch, etc.), using it instead of pure baking soda will affect the taste of your cookies.
While brown sugar keeps your cookies moist and soft, white sugar and corn syrup will help your cookies spread and crisp in the oven. Using more white sugar in your cookies will result in a crispier end product. To achieve a crispy cookie, skip the rest in the fridge.
They go from soft to hard because they start to dry out, and it begins as soon as you pull them from the oven. (Yikes.) Whatever moisture is left in the cookies is always in a state of evaporation. At the same time, the sugars and starches are solidifying.
Normally the cookie should not be too flat – should be rounded in the middle, should snap if it’s crispy or bend and break if it’s chewy. If it has nuts, there should be enough of them to have a piece in every bite. The cookies should be big enough to get a good taste of the cookie but not so big that it’s a full meal.
Why Are My Cookies Flat? Mistake: When cookies turn out flat, the bad guy is often butter that is too soft or even melted. This makes cookies spread. The other culprit is too little flour—don’t hold back and make sure you master measuring.
Flour is the main ingredient that provides structure in a cookie – without it, there would be no cookie! The gluten in flour forms a web of sorts – the framework that catches the air bubbles/gasses given off during rising. This helps provide the structure.
Cookie dough can be mixed by hand or with an electric mixer. Take butter or margarine from refrigerator 10-15 minutes before using or cut into 1-inch pieces so it will blend more easily and evenly with other ingredients.
So long as they end up evenly flat, that is; squashing cookies haphazardly under your palm means they may bake and brown unevenly. Still, if you care deeply (or even casually) about the look of your cookies, you can take the flattening step as an opportunity for enhancement. The bottom of a glass works fine, it’s true.
If you mix (or roll out) cookie dough too much, you’ll add excess air to the dough, causing it to rise and then fall flat in the oven. Overmixing the dough can also lead to excess gluten development, resulting in dense cookies.
Liquid milk, she says, “allows leavened dough to retain more gas,” therefore making it lighter. But liquid milk also adds water to batters and doughs, too much of which can ruin the texture of the finished baked good.
Yolks, where all of the fat is in an egg, increase richness, tenderness and flavor. Therefore, if you put an extra egg, you will get a chewier cookie. I do it all the time. If you put less, you will get a more crumbly cookie.
Eggs are responsible for giving baked goods structure, which means the amount you use directly affects the resulting texture. Using too few eggs will make your desserts dense, but using too many will make them rubbery. The explanation for this lies in the fact that eggs are made up of protein.
1. Granulated sugar. Using granulated white sugar will result in a flatter, crispier and lighter-colored cookie. Granulated sugar is hygroscopic, so it attracts and absorbs the liquid in the dough.
The role of vanilla in sweet baked goods is like the role of salt on the savory side: it enhances all the other flavors in the recipe. Without it, cookies and cakes tend to taste flat and bland. Forget to add the vanilla once, and you’ll probably never do it again!