Give Your Cookie Dough An Ice Bath To Solve An Annoying Baking Problem

Baking the perfect batch of chocolate chip cookies is an art, but science can certainly get in the way if you skip the step in most cookie recipes that calls for chilling the dough in the refrigerator for an hour before baking. We all want chocolate chip cookies that are soft and perfectly gooey in the middle, and that's why you've got to give your cookie dough an ice bath to solve the annoying baking problem that leads to thin, flat, and crispy cookies.

If you don't have time to chill your cookie dough down in the fridge, giving the dough a quick ice bath is the perfect solution. Once your dough has come together in a mixing bowl, transfer it to a large zip-top plastic bag and press to flatten. Build an ice bath with ice cubes and cold water in a large, flat-bottomed bowl or a rectangular baking dish and place the zip-top bag filled with cookie dough in the vessel to chill for about 15 minutes. From there, you can cut the bag to remove it, portion out your cookies, bake, and enjoy.

Chilled dough is essential for cookies to develop that coveted soft and chewy texture because it cools the fats and prevents the dough from spreading out on the baking sheet. Because the fats are cooler in chilled dough, it will expand more slowly than room temperature or warm dough when baked. This will help you avoid large, paper-thin cookies. Cookies baked from cold dough also tend to have a richer flavor because the cooling process allows the ingredients to meld together, with the dry ingredients absorbing moisture from the wet ones.

An ice bath is a particularly great tool to chill cookie dough because it can do so in about a quarter of the time it would take a refrigerator. It also works more effectively than the fridge because of the inherently high heat capacity of water. It takes quite a bit of energy for water to raise its own temperature and it will absorb and soak up heat faster than the air in the refrigerator.

You want your dough chilled before baking, but using room-temperature eggs is a little trick that will instantly upgrade your chocolate chip cookies. Room-temperature eggs blend together more evenly with the butter and sugar and create a smoother, more uniform dough. This even distribution helps the cookies rise and bake more evenly. Cold eggs can actually cause the dough to separate and look curdled, which can make for lumpy cookies. To bring your eggs to room temperature, take them out of the refrigerator and let them sit on a towel for about 30 minutes before mixing your dough.

For mouth-watering chocolate chip cookies, follow celebrity chef Duff Goldman's secret for perfectly gooey cookies. Goldman shared with Delish that he likes to bake cookies just long enough for them to develop a little bit of color. That's the "just right" balance to ensure the cookies are baked enough on the outside and nice and gooey on the inside.