Experts Share their Tips and Tricks for the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

Editors note: Recently we looked at the best kind of chocolate for chocolate chip cookies, today we continue our series on baking with chocolate and learn other ways to make chocolate chip cookies even better.

Getting ready to bake up batches of chocolate chip cookies for the holidays? Or maybe you’re just craving some chocolate-studded nuggets this weekend. Either way, home bakers, professional pastry chefs, and the Internet have plenty of advice to help you bake the best batch of chocolate chip cookies. Chewy or crunchy? Nuts or nuts? Whatever your preferences, we can all agree that they must have plenty of delicious chocolate.

Levain Bakery photo credit Kate Previte .jpg

To get some the inside scoop on baking the best chocolate chip cookies, we spoke to some cookie baking pros: Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald, co-founders of New York City’s famous Levain Bakery, and Alice Medrich, pastry chef, cookbook author, and overall chocolate expert. Here’s what they shared with us—read before you bake!

1. It’s all about the ingredients

“When making anything, our best tip is to use the best possible ingredients to set yourself up for success, especially good butter and good-quality dark or semi-sweet chocolate,” say Weekes and McDonald. “Different ingredients yield different results; we've always been advocates of keeping things simple, especially in a home kitchen. A good all-purpose flour can be used for almost anything, mix it less for a more delicate (pastry) result, more for a sturdier (bread) result.”

Medrich agrees. “[I recommend} all-purpose unbleached flour, not too high in protein hopefully.” She also suggests using a mix of half white and half brown sugar, adding that it can be fun to play around with other raw sugars in place of brown.

As for chocolate chips, “If I’m using actual chocolate chips, Guittard is the best I know of,” says Medrich. “I particularly like their Akoma or Semisweet.” But, she adds, “For a sexier, more decadent chocolate chip cookie, I will chop a good bar of dark chocolate into pieces instead of using the chips. Chopped bar chocolate does not hold its shape—it flows into tiny puddles in the cookies and they look less manufactured and more hand crafted. Chopped chocolate has a quicker melt in your mouth, and you can choose a quality that is better than even the best chocolate chips.” 

2. To chill or not to chill?

“We (almost) always start with ingredients right out of the refrigerator—you can always warm them up but it’s harder to cool them down,” says Weekes and McDonald.

For Medrich, it’s really a matter of preference and either way can work. That said, she uses melted butter for her chocolate chip cookie recipes, after testing softened and melted. “Hands down, I preferred the texture and flavor of those made with melted butter because the results were not high and cakey, but someone else might prefer a higher cookie with a cakier texture.” 

“I also rest the dough at least a few hours or better yet, overnight in fridge,” says Medrich. “This gets better flavor and texture, and even better color, all from the hydration of the flour, methinks.”

Meanwhile, Weekes and McDonald say chilling the dough isn’t totally necessary, especially if you’re in a hurry. “We do not think that a well-mixed cookie needs to be chilled before baking, but it is fine to refrigerate your dough. If you are rushed for time, you can always mix and scale your dough one day and bake it the next.”

3. If you can, weigh your ingredients

“For the best baking results, a scale is essential,” stresses Medrich. “It’s easier, cleaner, more accurate, and it helps the baker get the results promised—results that the recipe developer got in their kitchen.” When she gets feedback that a tried-and-true cookie dough was too dry or crumbly, Medrich is positive that the baker probably had a heavy hand with a measuring cup. 

That said, Weekes and McDonald say that once you’re comfortable with a recipe and have weighed your ingredients a few times, you may be able to switch to measuring cups. After all, “Weighing ingredients definitely takes any variation out, but sometimes when working at home it is just easier to use a measuring cup. Once you get to know a recipe, you will be more comfortable working in a way that is most efficient for you.”  

4. Check your oven temperature

Have you ever followed a recipe exactly, down to the minute, and still managed to burn your cookies? Your oven may be the culprit. “Every oven varies, even at our bakeries, so you need to figure out what temps and times work for your oven and what you are baking,” say Weekes and McDonald. This might mean using an accurate oven thermometer to figure out the true heat of your oven, and adjusting accordingly. 

“I bake My Chocolate Chip Cookies [on page 132 of Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies] made with melted butter at 375 degrees for 9-11 minutes and my Ultra Thin Chocolate Chunk Cookies [on page 51 132 of Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies] at 325 degrees for 20-25 minutes,” reveals Medrich.

5. Make a test cookie

Weekes and McDonald recommend baking a single cookie to determine how long it needs to bake, and at what temperature, in order to be your perfect cookie in terms of doneness (i.e. chewy vs crispy vs cakey). Bake one, let it cool, and break it open. “Once you figure it out, you will never need to do this again,” they say. 

6. Use different recipes for different textures

Medrich has completely different recipes for super crispy cookies, which has corn syrup and milk and no eggs, versus soft cookies with crispy edges, which has ingredients similar to the recipe you’d find on a package of chocolate chips. “I don’t have a formula for taking one recipe in different directions,” she says, although she recommends BakeWise by Shirley Corriher for that kind of information.