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The best Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies have crispy edges, soft centers, and the ratio of cookie dough-to-chocolate. Follow all my tips and tricks for the cookies of your dreams and the best way to freeze the dough for later.
Meggan’s notes
Everyone has an ideal chocolate chip cookie, and my favorite has a soft center with chewy edges and plenty of semi-sweet chocolate chips. It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally landed on the version that checks all the boxes.
Here are the secrets to the best chocolate chip cookies:
- Dueling sugars: Use a mixture of white and brown sugar for the ideal texture and flavor. Cookies made with only brown sugar turned out too soft, and cookies made with only granulated sugar tasted flat.
- Chill out: If needed, chill your dough in the refrigerator for 20 minutes. This will prevent your cookies from spreading too much, a great step if your kitchen is warm.
- Slammed: After baking the cookies for 10 minutes, take the baking sheet out of the oven and drop it on the counter to remove air bubbles. If you want a chewy cookie that’s still soft, this is the secret.
- Underbaked: To avoid crispy cookies, pull these out when they’ve set in the middle but the dough is still soft. They will finish cooking on the baking sheet.
Enjoy these cookies warm, straight from the oven, or sandwich two cookies around vanilla ice cream. You can even spread the dough in the bottom of a pie plate or cast-iron skillet for an irresistible pizookie!
Table of Contents
Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe Ingredients
At a Glance: Here is a quick snapshot of what ingredients are in this recipe.
Please see the recipe card below for specific quantities.
Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies Ingredient Notes
- Butter: Cold butter usually softens up in about 30 minutes when left out at room temperature (much longer if frozen). To soften butter in the microwave, cut each stick of butter in half, unwrap, and place on a microwave-safe plate. Then cook the butter at 10% power (that’s ten percent!) for 1 minute. Afterward, gently press on the butter with your finger. If still too firm, cook for another 40 seconds at 10% power.
- Chocolate chips, chunks, or nuts: You can use whatever you want because it’s your cookie!
How to Make Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Adjust oven racks to the upper-middle and lower-middle positions. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats. In a medium bowl or on to a piece of parchment paper, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
- In an stand mixer fit with the paddle attachment, or with an electric mixer on high speed, cream butter until pale and fluffy. Add the white sugar and brown sugars and beat until the mixture is smooth (not gritty when you rub between your thumb and finger).
- Add egg and vanilla and beat on low speed until blended, and scrape down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the flour mixture in batches (about 1 cup at a time) and mix on low speed until just blended.
- Add the chocolate chips and stir until just combined. (Optional: If it’s hot in your kitchen, consider chilling the cookie dough for 20 minutes or so. If the dough is too soft, your cookies will spread too much.)
- Working with 1 heaping tablespoon of dough at a time, roll dough into 1 1/2-inch balls and lay on prepared baking sheets about 2 inches apart. (I use the OXO medium cookie scoop, a size 40 portioner, and do 12 scoops of dough per baking sheet). If desired, press extra chocolate chips into the outside of each dough ball.
- Bake cookies until they start to brown around the edges, about 10 minutes. Remove baking sheets from oven and carefully drop (more like slam) baking sheets on counter to remove air bubbles from cookies.
- Return to oven and bake 2 minutes longer. Remove from oven and cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
Soft Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe Tips and Variations
- Yield: This recipe makes 12 cookies.
- Storage: Store extra cookies covered at room temperature for 4 to 5 days.
- Make ahead: Wrap the cookie dough tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for up to 4 days. When ready to bake, portion the dough as usual and bake.
- Freezer: Portion the dough into balls and freeze by arranging the balls in a single layer on a tray or plate that can fit into the freezer. Once frozen solid, transfer into a freezer-safe bag or container. Label and date, including the baking temperature and cooking time in the recipe. Bake the frozen cookies straight from the freezer in a 350-degree oven, increasing the baking time by a couple of minutes.
- Room temperature ingredients: The butter should be soft. Take the eggs out about an hour before you need them, or warm them up quickly in a glass of hot tap water. If you store flour in the freezer, measure it and leave it out for a while until it isn’t cold anymore.
- Preheat the oven. Make sure your oven is preheated to the correct temperature before baking. This is true with almost everything, but especially cookies.
- Sift dry ingredients: This is so the baking soda, baking powder, and salt can get distributed evenly within the flour. Also, here’s how to measure and sift flour properly so your baking recipes shine every time.
Best Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies FAQs
Chill the dough in the refrigerator for 15 to 20 minutes.
A few things can contribute to this. First, check that your dough isn’t too warm. Next, make sure you’re using foil or parchment paper; greased pans can cause a cookie to spread thin. And finally, if you’re reusing baking sheets, allow them to cool before you use them again. You can rinse them in cold water to cool them off quickly.
Check your baking sheet. The dark-colored, non-stick pans can prevent a cookie from spreading out. Also, make sure you preheated the oven enough. Finally, the dough could be too cold. Let it warm up a few minutes at room temperature.
This often happens when you try to lower the amount of fat (butter) or sugar in the recipe. It can also happen when the dough is overworked. Try to keep the proportions of butter and sugar as-is in the recipe, and don’t over-mix the dough when you’ve added the flour.
If the cookies on the baking sheet appear unevenly browned, this may be your oven. Halfway through baking, rotate the baking sheets front to back, upper to lower. Also, make sure you’re portioning out the cookie dough evenly.
Double-check your oven temperature; some ovens run hot by as many as 25 degrees. Also, stay away from dark baking sheets, which can brown cookies faster and burn the bottoms. If your baking sheets are too close to the heating source, try baking one sheet at a time with the rack positioned in the center of the oven. Finally, check the cookies at the minimum baking time, and pull them off the sheet to cool on a rack immediately.
If you stepped away from the oven without setting a timer and the cookies needed to come out a few minutes ago, remove them from the tray right away with a thin-bladed spatula to keep them from cooking even more on the baking sheet. Then set the timer for the next batch!
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Best Soft Baked Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup butter softened (1 stick, see note 1)
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 cup light brown sugar firmly packed
- 1 large egg at room temperature
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 heaping cup semi-sweet chocolate chips and/or chunks, plus more for studding the outside of dough balls (see note 2)
Instructions
- Adjust oven racks to the upper-middle and lower-middle positions. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats.
- In a medium bowl or onto a piece of parchment paper, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
- In an electric mixer fit with the paddle attachment, or with an electric mixer on high speed, cream butter until pale and fluffy. Add the granulated and brown sugars and beat until the mixture is smooth (not gritty when you rub between your thumb and finger).
- Add egg and vanilla and beat on low speed until blended, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary.
- Add the flour mixture in batches (about 1 cup at a time) and mix on low speed until just blended. Add the chocolate chips and stir until just combined. (Optional: If it's hot in your kitchen, consider chilling the cookie dough for 20 minutes or so. If the dough is too soft, your cookies will spread too much. )
- Working with 1 heaping tablespoon of dough at a time, roll dough into 1 1/2-inch balls and lay on prepared baking sheets about 2 inches apart. (I use the OXO medium cookie scoop, a size 40 portioner, and do 12 scoops of dough per baking sheet). If desired, press extra chocolate chips into the outside of each dough ball.
- Bake until the cookies are starting to brown around the edges, about 10 minutes. Remove baking sheets from oven and carefully drop (more like slam) baking sheets on counter to remove air bubbles from cookies.
- Return to oven and bake 2 minutes longer. Remove from oven and cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.
Recipe Video
Notes
- Butter: Cold butter usually softens up in about 30 minutes when left out at room temperature (much longer if frozen). To soften butter in the microwave, cut each stick of butter in half, unwrap, and place on a microwave safe plate. Then cook the butter at 10% power (that’s ten percent!) for 1 minute. Afterward, gently press on the butter with your finger. If still too firm, cook for another 40 seconds at 10% power.
- Mix-ins: You can use whatever you want because it’s your cookie!
- Yield: This recipe makes 12 cookies.
- Storage: Store extra cookies covered at room temperature for 4 to 5 days.
Nutrition
Meggan Hill is a classically-trained chef and professional writer. Her meticulously-tested recipes and detailed tutorials bring confidence and success to home cooks everywhere. Meggan has been featured on NPR, HuffPost, FoxNews, LA Times, and more.
Why 2 levels of baking sheets
I must have missed the reason, do you rotate cookies half way through?
Always enjoy your recipes.
Thanks
Hi Nancy, it’s so both baking sheets can bake at the same time while allowing the heat to circulate. I suggest rotating half way through baking to they bake evenly. I hope you love them! – Meggan
I love these sosososososso much ๐ love ๐
Hi so I am doing a lab in Culinary and I was given this recipe. I just wanted to say that they looked so good. When I started making my dough the end result was like a thin pale cake cookie batter and it was very pale. I think it’s I melted the butter all the way so when I whipped it it became a very cakey dough and very pale. Do you think my cookies will turn out all right? I don’t know what I would do if I failed this lab. Thank you.
Hi Amani, the butter should not be melted, only soft enough to beat so it becomes pale and fluffy. The dough itself will take on the color of the brown sugar, so it shouldn’t be pale when it comes time to drop the dough on the baking sheet. You also say whipped the batter, it should be beaten with a paddle attachment rather than whipped with a whisk attachment, but that might be what you did and just didn’t describe it. I would say you could bake a cookie or two and see how they turn out, I’ve made these so many times and never had issues. I don’t want you to fail of course, but you can always blame me and say my recipe was terrible. I know it’s not but I won’t be mad if you say that! Thank you, good luck. -Meggan
delicious. my egg was cold (instead of room temp as listed) and i used raw sugar instead of brown and they still turned out great. thank you!!
You’re welcome, Malika! – Meggan