Here’s a situation familiar to numerous home bakers: a craving for cookies hits, so you dive into a dish. Halfway through, the instructions say to chill the dough for anywhere from an hour to over night. While you might be lured to skip this step, a little perseverance can mean the distinction in between flat, breakable cookies and thick, chewy ones.

What Is the Purpose of Chilling Cookie Dough?
Chilling cookie dough accomplishes 3 primary results: thicker, chewier, and more tasty cookies. But how does it work?

It Cools Down the Butter, Preventing Oven Spread
The procedure of mixing cookie dough together generates heat and triggers the ingredients to warm as they integrate. Whether you began with room-temperature butter or melted, putting the cookies directly into the oven from mixing will cause the butter to melt quickly and the cookies to lose much of their structure. Enabling sufficient time for the dough to cool off in the fridge suggests that when you bake the cookies, the butter in the dough will be more solid, assisting the cookies keep their shape. This is specifically essential for recipes like these cut-out sugar cookies or gingerbread cookies, which will melt together in the oven if not properly chilled before baking.

It Hydrates the Flour, Creating a Chewy Texture
Even after you have actually made the dough, the active ingredients can gel together a lot more as they sit in the fridge. Throughout this time, the flour continues to absorb moisture from the wet ingredients. If you’ve ever made pie crust or another type of pastry, you might understand that an overly hydrated dough causes a chewier and less flaky result. If you like chewy cookies, that’s a good thing– the ended up product will be softer and less most likely to fall apart.

It Develops Flavor
Think about marinating meat or vegetables or letting a huge pot of sauce simmer for hours. The longer you can let the dough sit undisturbed in the refrigerator (approximately about 2 days), the more the ingredients can fuse together to form a more rewarding and homogenous taste.

Can I Freeze Dough to Speed Up the Process?
Yes and no. While this does accomplish the goal of cooling the butter before going into the oven, the freezer is too cold to correctly hydrate the dough. Since butter consists of about 16% water, chilling the dough in the freezer causes ice to form and hinders the hydration that would happen in the fridge. Freezing the dough also surrenders much of the taste that develops over a prolonged period of time.

You can, nevertheless, make cookie dough, cool it for the advised amount of time, and after that shape it into balls to freeze for later. In this manner, when that yearning for cookies hits, you can bake a couple of right from your stash in the freezer without thawing.

Exist Any Cookie Recipes That Don’t Require Chilling?
Yes! Specific cookie types, like snowballs and shortbread, are intentionally unchilled to attain their traditional crumbly textures. Other cookies that contain active ingredients like molasses or peanut butter may not require as much chill time because the doughs are thicker. Or, choose brownies or blondies to get your sweet reward repair without the wait time.

Additional Tips for Cookie-Baking Success
Utilize a Cookie Dough Scoop or Kitchen Scale for Uniform Cookies
Making certain your cookies are the very same size suggests they will bake more uniformly, guaranteeing more consistent bake times and textures across the batch.

Use Parchment Paper or a Silicone Baking Mat
Baking your cookies on among these surface areas, rather than straight on the pan, helps to even more reduce oven spread and avoid sticking once the cookies have actually cooled.

Be Prepared to Adjust Baking Times
Everyone’s oven is a little bit various. Your oven is likely a little off from the temperature level it states on the screen, and from the temperature the dish author used. Because cookies generally have brief bake times, watch on the cookies as they bake and utilize sensory cues, like browning around the edges and the intensity of the smell, to determine when they are done.

Shop Them Properly After Baking
To enjoy your freshly baked cookies for as long as possible, keep them in an airtight container. Utilize a sealed container on the counter or shop cookies in the freezer (not the refrigerator!) to keep air out and prevent them from going stale.