Why Ina Garten Starts Prepping The Night Before She Bakes Cookies

Some consider making cookies to be a quick process. It typically takes less effort and time than preparing a cake or a pie from scratch. Whether you are baking gooey chocolate chip cookies or festive sugar cookies, the classic recipes can be made in just a few steps with simple ingredients. However, famed baking professional Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, suggests planning ahead with one easy step: Leave your butter and eggs out of the refrigerator overnight to reach room temperature. Doing so allows them to be whipped into a creamy, fluffy consistency during the preparation process, improving the overall texture of the cookies.

Garten shared this tip in her cookbook, "Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks" (via Food & Wine). "In order for the butter to mix with sugar and become light and fluffy, as for a cake batter, it needs to be at room temperature," she wrote. "It won't get soft enough if you leave it on the counter for an hour; it takes hours for it to go from refrigerated temperature (38 degrees Fahrenheit) to room temperature (70 degrees Fahrenheit)." All said, it's important to note that the USDA does not recommend leaving eggs unrefrigerated for more than two hours because they become susceptible to bacteria growth when at room temperature. Butter, on the other hand, can be left out of the fridge for one to two days.

Room-temperature butter and eggs are crucial to making cookies. The process of creaming butter, sugar, and eggs properly allows the ingredients to mix evenly and for the butter to trap air. As a result, cookies become lighter and chewier after baking. But, while Ina Garten recommends leaving out your butter and eggs overnight, it is against what is recommended for refrigerated eggs in the United States. To best apply her advice, let your butter sit out overnight and remove your eggs from the refrigerator two hours before baking. The time of day does not matter when it comes to letting the ingredients arrive at room temperature (between 65 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit). By overnight, Garten is likely suggesting about 8 to 10 hours. Therefore, if you plan to bake at night, you can remove the butter from the refrigerator in the morning.

While the best way to let cold ingredients reach room temperature is to let them arrive at the temperature themselves, there are several tried-and-tested methods for softening butter faster. One hack is to leave the butter stick standing up while it softens since it allows the warmer air to touch more of the surface. You can also use Mary Berry's go-to butter-softening technique, which involves cutting cold butter into cubes and placing them in a bowl of warm water for 10 minutes.