The Best Cookie Baking Tips from a Pastry Chef | Ask Gemma

So it's almost the holiday season and this is where we get deep into the world of cookie baking. But have you ever had a lot of common questions that you have about cookies that you needed answers to? Well you are not alone and we have actually answered 1 million comments on our website alone about our recipes. So what we did was gather up all our most frequently asked questions about cookies and we're going to answer them for you today. The first question is how do I measure my ingredients for cookies? Using cups or using scales? For cookie dough, the answer is both. Either or work really well. Just make sure that when you scoop, you level off your measuring cups. I give grams, ounces and cups for all my recipes. Another common question, can I use whole wheat flour in my cookies? The answer is yes. I love to do that. Here's the secret. Anytime you're putting whole wheat flour into a recipe, do half white, half whole wheat. Don't do 100% whole wheat. It'll be too heavy. So half and half and you'll end up with a lovely cookie with a nutty flavor. Then people wanted to know, can you use cake flour for cookies? The recommendation is no. You don't need that softness. You need something with a higher protein, around 11-13% like all purpose flour does. This is 7-8%. It's not high enough. We don't recommend this. We also got the same question about self-raising flour. Can I use that in my cookies? We don't recommend it. Cookies are formulated already with the baking powder already in there. If you use self-raising flour and add baking powder on top of that, God only knows what you're going to end up with. You don't need all that raising agent. So just use regular, all purpose flour. Now if you don't eat gluten but you still want to make my cookies, no problem. This is my recommendation. One for one, gluten free flour, Bob's Red Mills or King Arthur flour. Something that is one for one replacement for all purpose flour. You get great results with these. I've made it before and they're really good. Another popular question, should you use brown butter when making cookies? The answer is you can if you want to. It does add extra flavor, extra nuttiness. It adds another dimension to the cookie. So if you want to brown your butter when you make a cookie, then no problem. Go for it. Now of course that second question is, how do you brown butter? Well come here and I'll show you. So in a heavy bottom saucepan, add in the butter that you need for your cookie. Turn the heat on to like a medium and just let this butter melt. What we're going to do now is just wait. Let your butter melt and soon it will start to change color. Give it a little stir every now and again to make sure it's not burning. But slowly you'll start to see it get a little bit amber. And just note that you want to take it off the stove top before it gets too brown. Otherwise it will continue to cook. What we want is a smell of toasty nuttiness but not burnt. So this took a few minutes. I was patient and it's looking great. It's smelling nice and nutty and not burnt. So you can remove it from the heat now. Once you brown your butter, just use it according to your recipe. My best ever chocolate chip cookies start out with melted butter so it's perfect to do it for this recipe. So a question I get asked a ton is, do I use salted or unsalted butter? And the answer for my cookies and all my baking is I use salted butter. It gives you more flavor. It just enhances your recipe that much more and I just find it, like, better. And I don't have to hold back on salt in my household so I like to use it where I can. The question that always follows that is, if I use salted butter, do I still add salt into my recipe? The answer is yes. I still add salt as well as my salted butter and I've never found any of my baking to be overly salted. If you have a preference and you're a little bit sensitive to salt, then feel free to reduce it or leave it out. Now for those of you out there who have tried my internet's best ever chocolate chip cookie, you will know the secret ingredient is olive oil. It adds a lovely nuttiness to your cookie and lots of lovely flavor. The question we get asked is, can I use extra virgin olive oil or is the flavor too strong? That's a really great question. It makes perfect sense. But let me tell you something, that extra virgin olive oil has more flavor. That gives your cookies more flavor. I started out using a mild oil when I first started making these cookies but now I use extra virgin olive oil. I use good quality and it makes the cookies amazing and people are coming back for more. So if you like that little bit of that nuttiness, then definitely use the good stuff. So now I knew this question would come up, can you use chocolate chips in cookies instead of chopping up a chocolate bar? Now you might remember that around two years ago I made a video about why you do not use chocolate chips in your chocolate chip cookies and needless to say it was quite controversial for a chocolate chip cookie video. Let me tell you my preference. Chocolate bar is always my preference. Get a good quality bar of chocolate, chop that up, and here's what you can do. You can control the cocoa solids, you can control how dark that chocolate is, you can control the quality. Also, bars of chocolates do not have added stabilizers or any funny business in there. It's just a good ol' bar of chocolate. That's what I choose to put in my chocolate chip cookies and it makes them next level. Now let's talk chocolate chips. You can get really good quality chocolate chips out there. The thing about chocolate chips is that they do have stabilizers, they often have sugar in them, and they don't cool when they melt just like the way a chocolate bar would. They stay together and they hold their shape and that's what they're supposed to do. That's their job. They're supposed to be a chocolate chip in a cookie, whereas my cookies are just next level, loads of chocolate, pooling everywhere. That's what I love in my cookies. Okay, next question, I was waiting for this. Can I use milk chocolate instead of bittersweet chocolate in my cookies? And the answer is no. Don't do it. Don't do it to yourself. You deserve better than milk chocolate. Get yourself a lovely dark bar of bittersweet chocolate, something around 70%, and this is what will make your cookies taste amazing. You want a lot of good quality chocolate in there, and then you have the nice sweet dough and then you get a balance of the contrast of both. You don't want sweet chocolate in a sweet dough. Just so you know, if you're worried that dark bittersweet chocolate is too dark for your young kids, my three and a half year old loves it. So let them try it and make up their own minds. I'm glad I get to answer this question. Our next one is, can I freeze cookie dough? The answer is of course you can. It is such a fantastic thing to freeze. All you want to do is make your dough, scoop it, put it onto a baking tray, freeze them flat. Once they're frozen, put them all into a bag, write the name on the bag of what they are, keep them in the freezer. It could not be simpler. I do it all the time. If there's an additional step in your recipe saying chill your cookie dough, you don't really have to do that when you're going to freeze them unless it's really soft dough. I keep cookie dough in my freezer for months on end. And here's a little tip for you when it comes to the holidays. Make your cookie doughs in October, November, freeze them and then you have them ready to go in December to be baked off fresh. So the question, what is aging cookie dough, is a really great one and I want to address that with you. Aging cookie dough, just like making fermented bread, making sourdough, things like that, is letting a dough sit over time and develop flavor and develop texture. So what you do when you're doing that with a cookie dough is make your cookie dough, cover it in cling wrap and put it in your fridge. Now this next step is really easy. Just leave it there. I'm talking about leaving it there for days, I'm talking about leaving it there for weeks. I do this all the time. It gives your cookies this lovely crinkle on top, it gives them amazing flavor and it just makes for a superior cookie. What I like to do is I always make my cookie doughs in advance and then I'll bake them off. I never make a cookie dough and just bake it off straight away, I age it. You will see, taste, smell the difference. I highly recommend it. A question we will get from time to time is I baked two trays of cookies in the oven and they didn't bake evenly. And this is very common. I'll tell you what you need to do. You need to have your oven on the convection setting, so fan assist. You need fan, you need air to be going around the oven as they're baking. That's when they will bake evenly. If you have it on standard oven, only one tray will bake. So put it on convection, your temperature will go down 25 degrees, your baking time may be longer, so just keep an eye out for that. But that will really help two trays or three trays bake at once. So unfortunately this happens from time to time, my cookies spread too much, what did I do wrong? There's a few things that can happen here. Your dough wasn't chilled before baking and they can spread out. Or maybe there was a problem with the recipe that you were using and the quantities were off and then the recipe just didn't work. That's not your fault. Then number three, maybe the dough was over-mixed. So I would say just look back over your recipe, see if there's anything you did wrong, make sure you chill your dough, and with a correctly formulated recipe, this should not happen. I think we've all been here, right? Is there any saving a burnt cookie? And the answer is, yes, there is. All you need is a grater. It's not ideal, but if it happens, just grate the base of your cookie, and within a few seconds, as good as new, totally gone, and it will taste good too, which is most important. Now I know what you're thinking, that's all very well and good Gemma, but how do I stop it from happening? That's a great question, here is your answer. What you want to do is use a lightly colored baking tray. Don't use dark baking trays because the dark ones brown your food faster. Use a lighter colored tray, just like this one. Also get this, did you know that your cookies continue to bake on the cookie sheet 20 minutes after they've been taken out of the oven? So here's what you want to do, get them off of there, put them onto a cooling rack, once they've cooled down for a little bit and you're able to move them. Now if you have a gas oven that heats from the bottom, burnt cookies can be a thing in your house and I'm very sorry about that. Here's what you can do though, you can also double pan your cooking sheet so it doesn't happen. Problem solved. So a frequently asked question is, my cookies came out dry, what did I do wrong? And you might not have done anything wrong, everybody's flour absorbs liquid differently so you could get different results than what I did even though we were using the same recipe. This is quite common, don't beat yourself up about it. I will say certain cookies like my Best Ever Chocolate Chip Cookies, my Internet's Best Chocolate Chip Cookies, my Double Chocolate Chip Cookies, the fudgy ones, they like to be under-baked because they stay gooey in the middle but they're not raw so if you want to just pull back a little bit on the timing, make sure you don't over-bake them and they'll stay nice and gooey in the middle and that will make them just right. Last but not least, how do I store my cookies? Well in this house we don't have any leftover to store but if you do in your house, let me tell you what you do. An airtight container like Tupperware container, put them in there, put that lid on, and it'll keep them fresh for like I would say 24 hours, it's not magic, it's not gonna keep them fresh for days but I recommend with a lot of my cookies that are softer, gooey cookies, eat them the day that they're made, that's when they're at their very best. If it's a sugar cookie or something that's quite crisp like a biscuit, those will last for days on end. Tupperware, lid on, you should be good to go. I hope I just answered all of your cookie questions but if you have any more baking questions, ask Gemma in the comments below and me and my team of experts will get them answered.