A few tweaks — more sugar, a dash of milk — can make cookies crispy, chewy, or cakey.
Good bakers know how to follow recipes. Great bakers know how to tweak them — how to deviate subtly from the printed word and create something that’s not just tasty but tailor-made to your palate. The line between good and great is surprisingly easy to navigate when it comes to chocolate chip cookies. All you need is a little cookie science and a friendly guide to show you the way.
Just a few simple changes can turn a regular chocolate chip cookie into one that’s extra-crunchy, extra-chewy, or extra-cakey. We recommend using our Easy Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe, but these tips are broadly applicable to chocolate chip cookie recipe that makes a similar quantity of finished cookies.
How to make crunchy chocolate chip cookies
Add 2 tablespoons granulated sugar and bake for 2 to 4 extra minutes.
What does the extra sugar do to the cookie dough?
Although sugar may seem like a simple ingredient, it plays a very important and complex role in cookie dough. It contributes to both texture and flavor in many ways: It melts in the heat of the oven to increase spread, and it creates little air pockets in the dough to expand and make cookies rise. Sugar also caramelizes and participates in Maillard reactions to add both color and additional flavor notes, and it recrystallizes upon cooling to give the cookies crispy texture. (Maillard reactions are when amino acids react with sugars to give you the brown color and caramelized flavor in baked goods.)
When adding an extra few tablespoons of granulated sugar, you increase the ratio of sugar to fat and flour in the cookie. This will result in a bit more spread, a larger surface area and more material to caramelize and react and, of course, a little bit of extra sweetness as well, which never hurts.
You may notice that the cookies won’t be crispy immediately out of the oven; that happens later. While the exact science of cookie cooling is still somewhat of a mystery, one theory is that as the molten sugar retreats to its crystalline structure and solidifies, the cookie becomes crispy as opposed to bendy. Working with that theory, we can then understand why the more sugar present to recrystallize, the more snap your cookie will have.
How does granulated sugar act differently than brown sugar?
Granulated sugar contains little to no “invert sugar,” which is what you find in the molasses or refiners syrup added to brown sugar. This invert sugar is actually single monosaccharide molecules that were created by breaking down the double disaccharide molecules that make up granulated or table sugar (sucrose). These monosaccharides possess different chemical properties that make cookies chewier, as we’ll see in the tip below.
Why the different bake time?
By adding extra sugar, you can bake the cookies to a slightly higher temperature without over-baking, which will allow for a crispier final cookie as well as deeper flavor development.
Why not just bake any version longer to get a crunchy cookie without added sugar?
While it’s certainly true that baking any cookie longer will cause it to have a firmer final texture, having the extra granulated sugar allows the cookie to maintain a tender, “snappy,” crisp texture (due to the properties discussed above), as opposed to a less enjoyable hard/crunchy texture.
