No stranger to these recipes so I do follow everything closely. Some ideas I have are:
Old baking soda, but it shouldn’t be more than a year old.
Too much moisture in butter? I browned it fairly slowly and it wasn’t “steaming “ by the time I finished. I weighed the ice cubes.
I beat the eggs for about 10min so that was fine. I have an oven thermometer so that was fine. I barely mixed the flower and chocolate. Maybe 15sec for both combined.
Dough rested for 24hrs.
Butter was “solid” when I beat back into the dough.
Dough was fridge cold when put into the oven.
Let me know if there’s another step you want to check.
I’ve made these long ago and they turned of perfect so I’m not sure what I’m missing here. My only guess is #1.
Thoughts?
by WeBuild
14 Comments
Excessive spread is usually related to the sugar/fat to flour ratio being too high.
Does the recipe call to beat the eggs for so long? That seems odd.
Whenever I bake cookies I cream the butter and sugar for several minutes but after that I mix as little as possible. Beating the eggs for 10 minutes seems wild.
Try from frozen and maybe bang the pan once or twice while they’re baking. Maybe once when baking, once when they’re done if they aren’t flat enough still
Are you disturbing the oven rack during the cooking process in a way that could cause them to de-gas? I make the kenji recipe all the time and I like really flat and crisp cookies but to get mine to look like yours I’d have to bang on the sheet tray multiple times during the process.
But my guess is
– baking soda not producing enough gas
– butter not mixed in throughly enough or too much butter
– are you flattening them into cookie shape or just place as balls?
In my personal experience baking these cookies, mine become flat when the sugar/egg mixture isn’t whisked to the proper consistency – thick ribbons. I have to whisk for much longer than recommended. 15 minutes on high is what did the trick this year.
I bet they still tasted great!
Ok, I am intimate with this problem, and this recipe, and here are the two main culprits:
1. You are not waiting long enough for the ‘ribbons’ when creaming the sugar, eggs and vanilla. There are short videos out there where you can see what you are shooting for. Do not get faked out by the suggested mixing time of 5 min, sometime it takes two or three times as long. The correct time is how long it takes to achieve the ribbons.
2. When you are cooling the browned butter, you need it to almost be a thick frosting texture.
These two things are buried in a comment way down in the comments on Kenji’s recipe. Ever since I read that comment, I haven’t had an issue.
Good luck!
I cut up the dough into the size I want and freeze them beforehand.
They go straight from the freezer to the sheet pan and into the oven almost immediately.
They’re perfect every time, gooey center and crispy edges.
Get an oven thermometer
Maybe more flour to contain the butter better. That’s usually how I fix spreading cookies.
What kind of baking sheet are you using?
The temp and time on that recipe never works for me. 400F for 10 minutes, straight from frozen, gets me a consistent cookie with a just slightly undercooked center. You don’t have to cook up a whole batch either; next time you make these I recommend balling them up before the fridge resting stage (way easier to ball up when soft) then do mini batches of just a couple cookies at different temperatures until you find the sweet spot.
Your butter was too warm when you made the dough
Hey so we have been playing with this recipe because we’ve had issues with them being too thin as well. We found that baking them at 350 F and using less butter (last time we made them we did half a stick less than the recipe calls for) has improved the integrity of the cookies.
They remind me of chocolate chip cookies I once made and forgot to add the bakeing soda, so my guess is that yours was indeed too old.