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The backbone of baking is science and the fun part- if you ask me. This entire blog is dedicated to science as much as it is to creating sweet treats. Experimenting with different cookie recipes, breaking them down into percentages, and analyzing their characteristics, all to find the “just right” Goldilocks combo that will be our own developed recipe.
Before delving into those nitty-gritty experiments, some foundational knowledge is called for. If we start experimenting without knowing why things are working out the way they are, we will get nowhere.
The best place to start in the food science of cookies (and the questions I get asked by people most often) is texture and troubleshooting. The ‘Why are my cookies flat or thick or dry or tough?’. This is a broad place to start in learning baking science. However, my intention is to lay the groundwork with some foundational knowledge and then get more granular as we learn. So, if you’re feeling like this information is too surface level for you, don’t worry, this is just the beginning.
From Professional Baking by Gisslen, we understand cookie texture and troubleshooting cookies. 1
When making your dream cookie, texture is bound to be at the forefront of your mind. For cookies, texture can be described as their crispiness, softness, and chewiness. Many people want a chocolate chip that’s crispy on the outside and soft on the inside or a sugar cookie that is chewy and soft. These characteristics and how to achieve them are often in contradiction with one another, which makes sense, so you play with the formula to get your desired byproduct.
Cookie Characteristics
The factors that lead to a crispy cookie: are low liquid, high sugar and fat content, long enough bake, and how small and thin your cookie is.
The factors that lead to a soft cookie are intuitively the opposite: a high proportion of liquid; low sugar and fat; the addition of honey, molasses, or corn syrup; underbaking; or a large thick size.
The factors contributing to chewiness are high sugar and liquid proportion but low fat, high proportion of eggs, or using flour with a higher gluten content.
Spread
The spread of a cookie is how much it expands and flattens during baking. More spread in a cookie will yield a flatter, crispier cookie while less will yield a thicker cakier cookie.
For cookies with more spread, you’re looking for more sugar content, baking soda content, liquid content, and to bake at a lower temperature & to use a coarse granulated sugar.
The creaming method has an impact on spread as well. If you beat the butter into the sugar longer and longer it increases your spread.
For cookies with less spread, the opposite is true. Using a lower sugar content, working with powdered sugar, mixing the butter and sugar until they are just combined, a low liquid dough, and baking at a high temperature will decrease the spread of the cookie.
When developing a cookie recipe, we will be balancing these factors to get our desired texture result. Let’s say, we wanted a chocolate chip cookie recipe to yield a crispy-on-the-bottom but soft-in-the-middle cookie. We will utilize a recipe with a high proportion of sugar and fat recipe while experimenting with larger and moderate-sized cookies and varied bake times and temperatures to see which yields the best result.
Troubleshooting
According to Gisslen, here are some common faults and their causes that we will utilize in our cookie experiments. 2
| Faults | Causes |
| too tough | flour has too much gluten too much flour not enough fat incorrect amount of sugar mixed too long after adding flour. |
| too crumbly | flour not incorporated enough. too much fat too much leavening not enough eggs too much sugar |
| too hard | flour has too much gluten not enough fat baked too long & too low. too much flour |
| too dry | baked too long too low. too much flour flour has too much gluten not enough fat not enough liquid |
| too pale | baking temperature is too low/ underbaked. not enough sugar |
| too much spread | baking temperature is too low. too much sugar too much leavening (creaming or chemical) too much liquid |
| not enough spread. | the baking temperature is too high. too much/ too strong of flour not enough sugar not enough leavening not enough liquid |
| sugary crust | improper mixing too much sugar |
Having read and absorbed all this information you may be wondering what a high proportion of fat and sugar is. In my next post on cookie science, I will go over the typical ratios of different cookies and will also break down different famous chocolate chip cookie recipes to see how these guidelines inform their proportions.
TL/DR
- Cookie textures can be broken down by: crispiness, softness, chewiness, and spread.
- Each of the factors can be influenced by changing certain variables. i.e. a higher content of sugar will produce a crispier cookie.
- Other problems with cookies have listed fixes.
Here’s a link to buy our source(s) of information if you’d like to read more: Professional Baking.