If you love baking cookies, you might want to know why chilled cookie dough is essential for a perfect cookie. You might feel the need to skip that all important chilling step, but let me explain why it is a good idea to place your dough in the fridge before baking.
Chilling the dough is essential for both cookie dough as well as the base of a short crust pastry. If you’re the kind of person who skips this step, this post is for you!
It’s not hard; the only thing you need to do is to have patience for an hour or so. During that time you can start tidying up the kitchen and make any other preparations for your finished product.
Resting the dough is essential for chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies and almost any other type of cookie you can think of. I know resting the dough can be a bit of pain. You want to just get on with the recipe and skipping the resting part is so easy to do. You want to just place those cookies on the cookie sheet, plop them in the oven and get it over and done with. The sooner you can start eating that freshly baked batch of cookies!
But for the most delicious cookies you do need to have that little bit of patience. I’ll explain why that is.
One of the reasons for chilling your dough is that having used soft butter also means that your dough is quite soft. It will be stickier because of this and if you want to use it right away the cookies will expand and spread a lot more. So let’s say you are trying to make cute Christmas cookies and have used a cookie cutter. You want the shape of those cookies to stay intact, but baking the cookies right away will probably make the shapes less pronounced.
Once the dough is chilled (and the butter is once again cold butter) it is much firmer and will be less likely to ruin the shape of your cookies. You will have less spread of the cookie dough. This also depends on the recipe you use, I have a special cut out sugar cookie recipe for perfectly shaped cookies!
Now if you take your dough from the fridge after the chill time, it might still be too hard to roll out. It will crack and crumble. So when I take the cold dough out of the fridge I quickly and briefly knead it by hand before rolling it out and place the cookies on the baking sheet. The short kneading is enough to make the dough pliable again.
Yes, chilling your dough also means your cookies will have a better flavor! Cookies and shortcrust pastry actually taste better if you leave the dough in the fridge. The flavors will be absorbed and the final cookies and crusts will have a better texture. If that is not enough reason to give your dough time to chill!
The longer the dough is left in the fridge, the better the result. Personally, I like to make the dough the day before when I make cookies with spices. That way I know the dough has had a sufficient chilling time. Especially with gingerbread or speculaas, the flavor is so much better. You can even freeze most cookie doughs. Obviously frozen dough needs to defrost first, but it’s the ideal way to always have delicious baked cookies in no time at all.
Do you have a love for crispy cookies? Then make sure you let them cool. It will make a huge difference. Most cookies contain gluten, which makes them tougher. But when you let the dough rest, the gluten relaxes. Relaxed gluten makes for crispy cookies. And we all want delicious chewy cookies with lovely crispy edges right?
So as you can see, for the best cookies you just need to have a little patience and give the dough enough resting time. You will be rewarded with a delicious cookie.
Before I answer some questions on this topic, I would love to share a few recipes that definitely need a chilled dough for the very best results:
For resting cookie dough the times are the same for all kinds of cookies and for all kinds of basic cookie dough. Around an hour should be enough. If you have large balls of dough you might need just a bit more so the cold can get all the way through the dough. For small dough balls it might be quicker but to be on the safe side you can use a longer amount of time for the chilling process.
For best results you should always chill your cookie dough. It will give you more flavor, crispier and a chewier cookie and overall the best results. So for next time, don’t skip the chilling. It’s not impossible to bake the cookies right away, but know the result will be different.
You can leave your cookie dough in the fridge for up to one week. Any longer and you will need to freeze it. It will be good to use for up to 2-3 months. Freezing is not necessary, but it sure is easy. Especially if you want to serve freshly baked cookies at any time.
It depends. If you want to shape it using cookie cutters, you definitely need to defrost. If you’ve already shaped the cookies into balls you can just bake them straight from the freezer. Keep in mind that the baking time might vary if you do. Usually you should add 2-3 minutes baking time to the recipe.
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