Ever since childhood, a chewy cookie is always present to comfort and satisfy a hungry stomach. Even until adulthood, a cookie or two has the same satisfying effect. With a chewy cookie, nothing can ever go wrong.
A cookie can be crispy, crunchy, or chewy, depending on how you like it. However, from a culinary perspective, it can be quite a challenge to achieve the perfect chewiness of a cookie.
So, many want to know what makes a cookie chewy? Please stick around, and let’s try to answer that.
A Chewy Cookie
Depending on one’s personal preference, cookies can be made hard, crunchy, soft, moist, or chewy. The result is greatly affected by the ingredients that are used for your cookie recipe.
There are a wide variety of cookie recipes out there that uses varying ingredients.
Additionally, many people also practice different cooking methods when making cookies which can also affect their quality. Finally, even how cookies are stored may also have an effect on how chewy they can get.
Tweaking The Ingredients
The staple ingredients that you can find in almost all of these recipes include flour, baking soda, eggs, brown sugar, and vanilla. Making adjustments to these ingredients will make a big difference in how your cookie will turn out.
1. Adding molasses or honey – One trick that can make your cookies chewy is by adding molasses or honey. This allows more moisture in your cookie, which results in a soft and chewy texture.
Remember not to add too many liquid sweeteners to your cookie since this will disrupt the consistency of the dough. A tablespoon of molasses should do the trick.
2. Replace white sugar with brown sugar – Like molasses, brown sugar contains more moisture compared to white sugar. Replacing white sugar with brown sugar will give you the chewy consistency you are after.
3. Use shortening – Using butter for your cookie may result in a dry, and hard consistency since butter contains milk, fat, and water. On the other hand, using shortening, which is pure fat, can give you a much more tender and chewier cookie.
4. Use egg yolk instead of egg white – Another tip is using egg yolks to replace egg whites on your cookie recipe. As it turns out, egg yolks contain more fat compared to egg whites. The process of using more fat will give you a chewier cookie.
5. Use baking powder instead of baking soda – Between baking soda and baking powder, the latter has a more acidic consistency. If you are using baking powder, this will prevent your cookies from spreading. As a result, this will keep the moisture in and avoid any excessive loss, which creates chewier cookies.
Baking Techniques
Aside from tweaking some of the ingredients used for your cookies to make them chewy, there are also baking techniques that will give you the same results.
1. Decreasing the temperature of the oven – Most recipes for making cookies require an oven temperature of 350 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. When your oven operates at a high temperature, it would often cause your cookies to lose moisture. As a result, the cookies will turn dry and hard.
To avoid this, you can follow recipes that require 325 degrees Fahrenheit when baking cookies. This will guarantee moist, soft, and chewy cookies.
2. Lessen the baking time – This next tip also somehow shares the same principle. Baking your cookies longer will often give you a crunchy texture on the outside. However, if you are aiming for a chewier consistency, cutting back on the baking time will do the trick.
3. Resting the dough in the fridge prior to baking – Finally, another fantastic trick that you can do is to let your dough rest in the refrigerator before baking. Do this for at least an hour to let some of the dough’s water content evaporate. This will leave more sugar content in your dough that will result in chewy and moist cookies.
Storage
Tweaking the ingredients and incorporating different baking techniques are not just ways to achieve chewy cookies. There are also ways of storage that can give you the chewy consistency you want.
1. Let the cookies cool completely before storing them – Once your cookies are done, let them cool in a baking rack but do not leave them out too long. Once they are at room temperature, you can store them properly.
2. Using an airtight container for storage – Following the cool-down process, you can use an airtight container to store the cookies to make sure they remain chewy and moist.
3. Adding a slice of fresh bread to your cookies upon storing – This is a trick that many are not aware of, but placing a piece of fresh bread in your cookie container can help keep it chewy and moist.
The bread adds moisture which the cookies absorb while in storage. After a while, you will observe that the bread slice will be dried out, and your cookies remain moist and chewy.