I am not a great cook, but I can usually follow a recipe. When I make chocolate chip cookies, they often come out totally flat. I don’t bake often, so I buy new containers of baking powder and soda. I use butter. Why don’t they rise? If I make oatmeal chocolate chip I have better luck, but the oatmeal is probably bulking them up. Help!!
You may not have enough flour for the amount of fat (butter), in which case your cookies melt and spread more during cooking. Try adding a little bit more flour. Actually too much liquid of any type to flour ratio gets you flat cookies. Add more flour.
Try watching Three Chips For Sister Marsha for an explanation of how some minor changes in the recipe can make major changes in the finished product.
My brother used to make flat chocolate chip cookies, it was because he’d melt the butter to almost boiling (steaming out some of the water). Just use soft butter.
I have had luck using half butter, half margarine or butter-flavored Crisco*. This will make your cookies thicker and chewier.
*That is, take the amount of butter the recipe calls for, and replace half of it with margarine/Crisco.
Another tip to make chewier, less crisp cookies, is to use all brown sugar – replace any white sugar with brown sugar.
Also, chill the dough in the refrigerator before cooking.
My wife and I found a recipe recently for insanely thick chocolate chip cookies. You can see 3 or 4 layers of chips when you bite into them. It’s like eating heaven. I’ll ask my wife for the recipe later today and post it.
Thank you. They sound delicious!
I agree with the butter hypothesis. If you want a thicker cookie, use half Crisco (which has a higher melting point) and/or butter just soft enough to cream, and consider refrigerating your dough before you bake it. You want butter that takes long enough to melt in the oven that the gluten in the flour has a chance to firm up first. The cold butter holds space, then melts away, leaving teeny tiny air holes. If it melts too soon, there’s no space.
Or your baking powder could be dead. But then you’d see a problem with your other recipes, too.
Are you at a higher elevation?
I’ve found that if you chill the dough for a couple of hours before you start baking the cookies, they don’t flatten out, and they come out of the oven nice and thick. I tend to take the cookies out a minute or so before they’re totally done, too.
Used a little more flour, half Crisco, chilled the dough, and had good luck and normal looking cookies. Thanks for all the help!
We’re waiting.
Yes, please!
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.
In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and white sugar until well blended. Beat in the vanilla, egg, and egg yolk until light and creamy. Mix in the sifted ingredients until just blended. Stir in the chocolate chips by hand using a wooden spoon. Drop cookie dough 1/4 cup at a time onto the prepared cookie sheets. Cookies should be about 3 inches apart.
Bake for 15 to 17 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are lightly toasted. Cool on baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool completely.
Enjoy!
It seems you’ve found a variety of solutions, but I just wanted to mention that you don’t need to use Crisco to produce a non-flat cookie. I use all butter, all the time and get really good results. And I bake a lot. Crisco is yucky.
I highly recommend refrigerating the dough for as long as you can. Even just ten minutes makes a difference in the final shape of the cookie. An hour makes for a significantly less flat cookie. A day in the fridge has the added benefit of doing very nice things to the flavor of the dough.
One other potential source of your problem could be the size of the egg(s) you are using. The jumbo supermarket eggs are way too big for baking. One “large” (the term I see in a lot of cookbooks) cracked egg should weigh about 1.7 ounces. If I’m worried about the size of my eggs (not usually the case, as I pack my own cartons at the co-op), I weigh them before I add them to the dough and just discard the extra.
In general, the first things I would recommend for fixing the dough for a flat cookie are refrigeration and the addition of a couple extra ounces of flour.
Cisco just posted the best recipe for chocolate chip cookies I have ever found. The ingredient list is exactly the same as the recipe posted on Smitten Kitchen, here. I can’t recommend that recipe highly enough.
Thanks Cisco!
Well I just had a roaring success with my chocolate chip cookies tonight and thought I’d run back to this thread to let on that my secret to tall, somewhat puffy yet chewy cookies turned out to include butter flavor Crisco.
Oh well.
They taste damned good to me though. Didn’t have to refrigerate a thing either. I also used all brown sugar instead of a mix with white.
This was the recipe I modified:
http://cooksrecipes.com/cookie/ultimate_chocolate_chip_pecan_cookies_recipe.html
I only had a half cup of pecans and all Crisco. I’ve never used Crisco before but I had a recipe last week that called for it so I had it on hand. I think it made a better than usual cookie and I don’t taste any yuckiness at all.
Flat crispy choco chips are great!
Great website Chum. Its like food porn.
IMHO this is the step that isn’t as understood as well as it should be,
CMC fnord!