Shauna Sever's Chocolate Chip Cookie Brittle Recipe on Food52 (2024)

FAQs

How long to age chocolate chip cookie dough? ›

Some recipes call for a quick chilling, while others recommend up to 72 hours of resting before baking them. This resting time does two crucial things for cookies. First, it allows the fat in the cookies to chill and firm up.

Not Enough Flour

Our cookies were brittle and greasy and cooked much faster than the other dough balls on the sheet. Though the culprit is usually a flour deficit, butter could also be to blame for this problem. Adding too soft or slightly melted butter to the dough can also result in flat cookies.

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.

Don't taste or eat raw (unbaked) dough or batter. Don't let children handle raw dough, including play clay and dough for crafts. Uncooked flour and raw eggs can contain germs that can make you sick if you taste raw dough. Wash your hands, bowls, utensils, and countertops after handling raw flour, eggs, or dough.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.

Baking soda also serves another important purpose when it comes to cookies: It encourages spreading by raising the mixture's pH, which slows protein coagulation. This gives the dough more time to set before the eggs set, which results in a more evenly baked cookie.

Baking powder is a two-in-one chemical leavening that combines a powdered alkali (sodium bicarbonate) with a powdered acid (originally, tartaric acid). When moistened in a dough or batter, a chemical reaction takes place that produces carbon dioxide gas, inflating cookies, cakes, and pancakes.

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.

If you are tasting baking soda in your dishes, it means that it has not reacted with enough acid to produce carbon dioxide and is left underutilized. So, always err on the side of adding enough acid (depending on what you are baking, this could be yoghurt or some other culinary acid).

How do you fix brittle cookie dough? ›

If you overmix the dough, the cookies will be dry and crumbly. The best way to fix this is to add more liquid to the dough. This can be done by adding milk, water, or even melted butter. You may also need to add more flour to the dough if it is too wet.

Using too much flour will make your cookies too cakey, so try reducing the flour amount by two tablespoons.

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

All-Purpose Flour: The Versatile Choice

This balanced protein level makes it versatile enough to produce both soft and chewy cookies as well as slightly crisp ones. If you're looking for a safe bet or are new to cookie baking, all-purpose flour is your go-to option.

For best quality, freeze for two months. Homemade cookie dough should be stored in small containers in the refrigerator for two to four days or freeze for two months. Alternatively, small quantities of dough can be frozen and thawed in the refrigerator as needed.

Homemade dough, when stored in an airtight container, is best to use within 3-5 days, but may be good up to one week. To assist in your baking, consider pre-scooping the dough for storage in a container with a lid or rolling the dough into a log and wrapping it in plastic wrap.

The cookie baked from room temperature, being thinner, has a more uniform texture, while the one baked straight from the fridge. is thick enough to accommodate a softer interior. and crispier exterior. No contest. Generally speaking, you should chill your cookie dough before baking it.

Most cookie dough can be refrigerated, well-wrapped, for 3-5 days before baking. If you want to make it farther in advance, freeze the dough.