What type of brown sugar for chocolate chip cookies

These cookies should be stored in an airtight container. And they will stay fresh longer if they are completely cool before you pack them up. We usually add a layer of parchment paper between each row of cookies in our plastic container. They will stay fresh at room temperature for days if you store them correctly in an air-tight container. They will last up to 3 months in the freezer.

Did you Make this Recipe? Leave a review below , then snap a picture and tag twosisterscrafting on Instagram so we can see it! Let's stay in touch! Our best tricks for making outrageously delicious cupcakes for any occasion. These are delicious. I just made a half batch using bittersweet chocolate chips and Baileys Irish Cream baking chips.

Your email address will not be published. So, for the sake of accessibility, we chose to stick to the basics: white, light brown, and dark brown. Sucrose is just common table sugar , FYI. Her sugar of choice? A combination of both brown and white. So, to better understand how sugar affects cookies, we decided to test five batches of cookies and compare them in a side-by-side taste test.

We stuck to five of the most popular varieties and combinations of sugars professional bakers swear by and kept all of the other variables the same. If you can't see the sign-up box above, just enter your email address here. Here are the five sugars and sugar combinations we tested and how they affected the cookie:.

Turns out, this is how Toll House likes to do it , so this is where we will begin. Brown sugar, as it turns out, is more capable of retaining moisture , which explains its many characteristics that you've probably experienced while baking with it.

We're talking about the denser texture and extra moistness brown sugar often lends. There's another catch, too: Brown sugar is a little acidic in nature, causing it to interact with the leavening agent at play, possibly resulting in a a cakier cookie. Then again, if you're a lover of thin and crisp cookies, you might prefer the neutral white that will spread across that pan.

By combining the two, you're hopefully getting the best of both worlds. At least that's what Toll House tells us. This is what is called for in the control recipe. The Results: As expected, these cookies had the best of both worlds. They spread nicely and had a subtle caramel flavor from the brown sugar.

Whisk together brown sugar, melted butter, and vanilla extract until smooth. Add the egg. Mix until thick and smooth. Add the flour, salt, and baking soda. Stir together until a soft dough forms. Add the chocolate chips. Cover the bowl and chill for 30 minutes. Dough may be chilled overnight. See note. Bake Cookies. Preheat oven to degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Drop dough, about 2 tablespoons each onto the prepared baking sheet. Space cookies about two inches apart as cookies spread as they bake. Optional: Sprinkle the tops of the cookies with a little kosher salt before baking. Brown Sugar: Use either light or dark brown sugar in this recipe.

Chocolate Chips: Think of the one cup of chocolate chunks or chips as a suggestion. If you like chocolate chip cookies loaded with chocolate chips, add more. If you prefer chocolate chip cookies with only a sprinkle of chocolate chips or chunks, use less chocolate chips. Chilling the Dough: This dough needs to chill for 30 minutes before baking.

However, it may be chilled for longer. The longer the dough chills, the less the cookies spread during baking and the more toffee-like the flavor becomes. This is a great recipe!

These cookies came out flatter than is typical but they were uniform and had a rich light brown color. The flavor combo of chocolate, caramel, and salt works for grown-ups and kids alike! Wouldn't anyone be pleased to be married to someone who fills the house with the aroma of warm butter, caramelized sugar, and gooey chocolate? Indeed, wouldn't any human being in the right mind yearn to be constantly surrounded by sweet, crisp-and-chewy snacks?

Then, as I glanced around the apartment, wiping chocolate-specked hands against my apron, running a finger across the countertop and tracing a line into the dusting of white powder that coated every surface in the kitchen, eyeing the dozens of bags of failed experimental cookies that blocked the television, opening the refrigerator door to discover that more than half of its contents were batches of uncooked cookie dough in various stages of rest, I thought, maybe she does have a point.

For the past few months, I've had chocolate chip cookies on the brain. I wake up in the middle of the night with a fresh idea, a new test to run, only to discover that my pound flour bin has been emptied for the third time. Did I really use it all up that fast? I'd put on my coat and walk out in the cold New York winter night, my sandals leaving tracks in the snow as I wander the neighborhood, searching for a convenience store that will sell me flour at three in the morning.

You see, I've never been able to get a chocolate chip cookie exactly the way I like. Stella has developed amazing recipes for quick and easy chocolate chip cookies , thick and chunky Levain-style chocolate chip cookies , and thin and crispy Tate's-style chocolate chip cookies. But I'm talking about chocolate chip cookies that are barely crisp around the edges with a buttery, toffee-like crunch that transitions into a chewy, moist center that bends like caramel, rich with butter and big pockets of melted chocolate.

Cookies with crackly, craggy tops and the complex aroma of butterscotch. And of course, that elusive perfect balance between sweet and salty. Some have come close, but none have quite hit the mark.

And the bigger problem? I was never sure what to change in order to get what I wanted. Cookies are fickle and the advice out there is conflicting. Does more sugar make for crisper cookies? What about brown versus white? Does it matter how I incorporate the chocolate chips or whether the flour is blended in or folded? How about the butter: cold, warm, or melted? I made it my goal to test each and every element, from ingredients to cooking process, leaving no chocolate chip unturned in my quest for the best.

Most traditional chocolate chip cookie recipes start with the same basic ingredients and technique: butter and a mix of granulated and brown sugar are creamed together with a touch of vanilla until fluffy, eggs are beaten in one at a time, followed by flour, salt, and some sort of chemical leavening agent baking soda, baking powder, or a bit of both.

The mixture is combined just until it comes together, then spooned onto a baking sheet and baked. When you bake a cookie, here's what's going on, step-by-step:. It's a simple technique that hides more complicated processes underneath. So how do you decipher what's going on? My first course of action was to test out these basic ingredients one at a time in order to determine how they affect the final outcome. Butter is where most recipes begin, and it provides several things to the mix.

First, butter keeps cookies tender. When flour is mixed with water such as the water found in eggs , it develops gluten, a tough, stretchy network of interconnected proteins that set up as they bake. Gluten can't form in fat, thus butter will inhibit its overall formation, leading to more tender results.

The higher the proportion of butter to other ingredients, the more tender your cookie will be and consequently, the more it will spread as it bakes. I found that a ratio of 1 part flour to 1 part sugar to 0. Because of shortening's different melting qualities and the fact that it has no water content , shortening-based cookies come out softer but more dense than those made with butter. How butter is incorporated can also affect texture.

In the early creaming stages of making a cookie, cool butter is beaten until it's light and fluffy. During the process, some air is incorporated and some of the sugar dissolves in the butter's water phase.

This air in turn helps leaven the cookies as they bake, giving them some lift. Melting butter before combining it with sugar and eggs leads to squatter, denser cookies.

Butter is essential for flavor. Substituting butter with a less flavorful fat like shortening or margarine yielded sub-par cookies. These proteins brown as the cookie bakes, adding nuttiness and butterscotch notes to the final flavor of cookies. I asked myself: if browning milk proteins provide extra flavor to cookies, how could I boost that flavor even more?

My friend Charles Kelsey, the man behind the fantastic Brookline, MA sandwich shop Cutty's, developed a simple chocolate chip cookie recipe for Cook's Illustrated magazine back in In his recipe, he made the ingenious discovery that browning the butter before adding it to the mixture would give the cookies a much more pronounced nuttiness. But this created some other problems. Since the butter can't get hot enough to brown milk proteins until all of its water content has evaporated, brown butter adds no moisture to dough.

This produces a couple of interesting results. Without water, sugar that is mixed into browned butter cannot dissolve sugar molecules are highly hydrophilic and will dissolve readily in water, but not in fat , which makes it subsequently more difficult for them to melt into each other as the cookie bakes.

The cookies ended up missing out on some of that caramelized toffee flavor I was after. With less water, you also end up with less gluten development, thus a cookie made with browned butter is softer and more tender than one made with creamed or plain melted butter. Soft and chewy is good, but I wanted a slightly better balance.

So how do I get the flavor benefits of browned butter while still allowing for sugar to dissolve and caramelize properly? The answer turned out to be in the eggs. Before we jump to the solution, let's take a quick look at what eggs have to offer in a cookie. Egg whites provide a good amount of water, as well as protein. Egg proteins are particularly good at trapping and retaining bubbles of air or water vapor.

The higher the proportion of egg white in a cookie, the more it rises during baking. Because of the extra water, you also get more gluten formation, which again leads to a taller cookie provided you use enough flour to absorb that extra water. Other than the small amount in the butter, eggs are the main source of water in a cookie dough recipe.

Egg yolks also provide some moisture and protein, but more importantly they provide a well-emulsified source of fat. When cooked, egg yolk forms a tender protein coagulum that can keep cookies tender and fudge-like. A high proportion of egg yolk leads to a more brownie-like texture in a finished cookie.

By keeping the total mass of egg added to a dough the same but altering the proportion of white to yolk, you can achieve a variety of textures. Two whites and a yolk, for instance, produces the more open structure of the top cookie in the photo above, while three yolks and no whites produces the denser, fudgier texture of the cookie on the bottom.

Turns out that the combination I like best is actually a 1 to 1 ratio of egg whites to egg yolks, which conveniently is exactly how eggs naturally come. Ain't that something? Going back to my initial problem of wanting the flavor of browned butter but disliking the way it prevented sugar from properly dissolving, I asked myself, what if I were to flip the script for these cookies: instead of creaming sugar and butter and adding eggs, why not beat together the eggs and sugar then add the butter?

I tried it, beating brown sugar, granulated sugar, and vanilla with whole eggs in a stand mixer until the mixture became pale, aerated, and ribbony, with a nearly completely smooth texture. Lesson learned: let that browned butter cool before adding it. My working recipe contained about 4 ounces of egg and 10 ounces of sugar, so perfect smoothness was an impossible goal.