How Ingredients Behave in a Cookie Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How does each ingredient affect a cookie? ›

Baking soda increases browning and spreading, resulting in a flatter cookie. Baking powder will give you a puffier cookie. Binding agents are the liquid in the recipe that hold the cookie together. Examples of binding agents are eggs, milk, honey, and fruit juice.

Dry ingredients such as flour, sugar, and spices play a critical role in providing structure and flavor to baked goods, while wet ingredients such as eggs, milk, and oil bind everything together and add moisture.

Incorporating ingredients into the dough in the wrong order can entirely throw off your cookies. It's not just enough to mix the dough for the correct amount of time — the order that you incorporate ingredients into the dough matters.

Have you ever baked cookies that were too hard, too soft or didn't taste the way they should? The ingredients you used could be the culprit – using different sugars, melted butter, baking powder or baking soda can alter a cookie's texture and taste.

Sugar dissolved in baking forms a syrup as the dough heats up. Different types of sugars affect the texture because they absorb different amounts of water. Remember moisture is the key! White sugar creates crispier cookies and brown sugar creates chewier cookies.

Granulated sugar absorbs moisture better, giving you the nice crispy texture you're craving! Weirdly enough, eggs also contribute to soft cookies. So if you can limit or exclude eggs from your cookie recipe, you'll have an easier time getting them crisp!

For example, using high quality flour and butter in a cake will result in a tender and moist cake, while using lower quality ingredients may result in a dry and crumbly cake. Another benefit of using high quality ingredients is that they are often more nutrient-dense and healthier for you.

As a cookie bakes a few things happen. Heat will melt the fat causing the cookie to spread. Water will evaporate creating gas pockets giving rise to the cookie and dry out cookie (especially at the edges). Egg and flour proteins will denature as the cookie heats cross-linking trapping the expanding gasses.

Over mixing the batter is the most common baking error and can result in a dense cake. Mixing the ingredients works the flour, activating the gluten. But, the more gluten that develops, the tougher your cake can be. If there is a damp or dense streak in your cake, you may have over creamed your eggs, butter, and sugar.

Measure Accurately—This is the Foundation of Your Recipe

Too little flour can make a cookie flat and too much flour can make a cookie hard or crumbly, so learning to measure accurately is one of the keys to successful baking. Here's how to measure a few key cookie ingredients.

What not to do when making cookies? ›

Loading all the ingredients in the bowl at once may cut down on time, but it compromises the texture of your cookies.

The ingredients you use and how you shape your cookies both play an important role in whether your cookies turn out crispy or chewy. The type of flour and sugar you use, if your cookie dough contains eggs, and whether you use melted or softened butter all factor into the crispy-chewy equation, too.

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Fat is a very important ingredient in cookies – it tenderizes, crisps and browns, adds color and a wonderful flavor that is impossible to duplicate. Butter, our fat of choice, ensures good baking results and adds the most desirable taste, texture and appearance.

The cookies made with 100% brown sugar would be weirdly porous and take a while to crisp, but they'd be extra malty and delicious. The version made with 100% white sugar may not be as light, but they'd be particularly crisp and spicy, as the ginger would remain untamed by molasses.

Just like in the laboratory, even the seemingly smallest changes can affect the outcome — oven temperature variations, moisture and even the order in which you add the ingredients are just a few of the factors that can affect texture and taste.