This Is Why You Should Chill Your Cookie Dough Before Baking (2024)

FAQs

This Is Why You Should Chill Your Cookie Dough Before Baking? ›

For starters, chilling prevents cookies from spreading out too quickly once they're in the oven. If you use a higher fat butter (like Kerrygold), chilling your dough is absolutely essential. Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool.

The colder your dough is before it heads into the oven, the less it will spread during baking, which makes for loftier cookies. The chilling phase also gives the flour in your dough time to hydrate, just like pie dough, which translates into a cookie that's more chewy than cakey.

Sure, you can skip the chilling step and bake the dough right away, but doing so runs the risk of flat disks with dry edges and a brittle texture; a far cry for the plush, chewy cookies with fudge-like centers we all crave.

Cool and relaxed pastry is far more likely to hold its shape when cooking. Relaxed gluten won't shrink nearly as badly, so that's why you rest pastry cases before blind baking. If, when you get the pastry out of the fridge after resting and it seems too stiff to roll, don't let it warm up.

For best quality, freeze for two months. Homemade cookie dough should be stored in small containers in the refrigerator for two to four days or freeze for two months. Alternatively, small quantities of dough can be frozen and thawed in the refrigerator as needed.

Solution #1: Refrigerate Your Dough

One of the main causes of sticky dough is adding too much melted butter. If you put your dough in the fridge for 30 minutes to an hour, the butter will firm up a bit and make the dough much easier to handle.

Letting the dough rest allows gluten strands to form slowly for more of a chew. When developing recipes for Treehouse Bakery, cookies were rigorously tested at different durations of rest. Anything rested less than 5hrs had no chew, and lacked flavour.

As a general rule of thumb, you should refrigerate cookie dough for at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours. More than that, and you won't see a noticeable difference in the final product. Once the dough has chilled, let it warm up at room temperature until it's just pliable (about 5 to 10 minutes).

Storing your dough in the fridge helps to harden the fat and prevent your cookies from spreading. Allow it to chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Storing and Chilling the Dough: Your cookie dough needs to be chilled for at least 2 hours or until firm before baking to ensure you get the best peanut butter cookies possible.

Why is it important to chill pie dough? ›

Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes, or up to overnight. Tip: Chilling hardens the fat in the dough, which will help the crust maintain its structure as it bakes. And the short rest before rolling relaxes the dough's gluten, helping prevent a tough crust.

The fridge rest firms the fat (butter) and also allows the flour to hydrate. If you do not cool it enough the dough will be too soft and sticky to shape.

Non-chilled crust is fairly crumbly and less smooth, which makes it harder to roll out and means it may not look as polished. It will brown more quickly and the final product will likely be tougher, heavier, and more doughy – none of those in a bad way. It will likely have a more intense, butter flavor.

The cookie baked from room temperature, being thinner, has a more uniform texture, while the one baked straight from the fridge. is thick enough to accommodate a softer interior. and crispier exterior. No contest. Generally speaking, you should chill your cookie dough before baking it.

Chilling cookie dough before baking solidifies the fat in the cookies. As the cookies bake, the fat in the chilled cookie dough takes longer to melt than room-temperature fat. And the longer the fat remains solid, the less cookies spread. In addition, the sugar in the dough gradually absorbs liquid.

Chilling the dough creates fluffier cookies with better consistency. Epperson said that, like many foods, cookie dough benefits from resting (in the refrigerator) to let the flavors infuse and basically marinate together. So not only will the cookie's consistency be more even, but the actual taste will be better, too!

The fridge constantly circulates cool air to keep things cold, but this will also result in drying out your dough. (There are some recipes that call for chilled dough and typically the recipe will have been created to account for this.)

Cookie dough should only sit out for 2-4 hours at room temp because the ingredients that are normally in cookie dough include both eggs & butter.

When cookie dough is frozen, the fats and sugars in the dough have more time to meld together, resulting in a richer and more complex flavor. Additionally, freezing the dough helps to solidify the fats, which can prevent the cookies from spreading too much while baking, resulting in a thicker and chewier texture.

1. Storing cookie dough in the refrigerator: To store cookie dough in the refrigerator, cover the mixing bowl with a tightly sealed sheet of plastic wrap or transfer the dough to an airtight container. For the best quality, use the dough within three days.