Will Resting Your Cookie Dough Yield Better Cookies? (2024)

FAQs

Will Resting Your Cookie Dough Yield Better Cookies? ›

The short answer is: Yes. Resting your dough in the refrigerator will almost always yield better results. But why? Chilling your cookie dough in the refrigerator after mixing it allows the flour to hydrate and gives the other ingredients time to blend, resulting in a richer, more well-rounded flavor profile.

From a taste and texture perspective, 16 hours appeared slightly crispier and less chewy. Shorter rest periods created chewier cookies, and longer extended rest periods over 16 hours produced a good balance of both textures. Cookie dough is a complex mixture of different players in the form of ingredients.

Cool down your dough for a tastier, chewier cookie.

There's a few reasons why, but one important part is it gives the butter in your dough a chance to firm up before baking. The colder your dough is before it heads into the oven, the less it will spread during baking, which makes for loftier cookies.

The primary reason for a brief resting period to redistribute the liquid in the dough. While the dough sits, turning from loose and soft to drier and more scoopable, the flour is hydrating, yielding cookies that will bake and brown more evenly.

But the truth is, the primary reason bakers chill their dough is to prevent cookies from spreading too much. Chilling firms up the fat (usually butter) in the dough, ensuring that the dough doesn't spread too quickly in the oven.

This is really up to you. If you're short on time, try and squeeze in at least half an hour if you can. 30 minutes will do the trick if you're simply looking to avoid your cookies spreading all over the place. If you have the luxury of chilling the dough overnight to develop flavor, go for it.

“Well-rested dough will be fully hydrated, easier to work with, and yield a better texture,” says BA's deputy food editor Hana Asbrink. A bit of patience will reward you with chewy, bouncy noodles. It's a step you just can't skip.

The short of it? Chilling cookie dough makes the cookies much more flavorful, with that blissful caramelized butterscotch flavor, and it makes them thicker, chewier, and browner.

So, let your cookies cool just until they hold their shape (generally after about 5 minutes on a cookie cooling rack) and savor them warm while you can. So next time you're wondering, "Do I need a cooling rack to cool cookies" the short answer is—it's better to have one than not.

For deeper flavour (and convenience), most doughs can be put in the fridge for their second rise and left to prove overnight. This sounds wrong, given that doughs rise fastest in warm conditions, but it really does work. Put the dough in the fridge straight after shaping, covered with oiled cling film.

Where should cookie dough rest? ›

the more you give the dough time to rest in the fridge. after mixing, the more you allow the flour to fully hydrate. and the butter to solidify. this will give a cookie that spreads less.

Baking Powder. The type of leavening you use in your cookies doesn't just help them rise while baking, it affects their texture and structure too. Baking soda in cookies yields a denser cookie with craggy tops, while baking powder causes cookies to rise higher during baking for a cakier texture.

There's another benefit to this trick: Resting your cookie dough before baking also helps the cookies hold their shape in the oven, leading to more browning and caramelization of the dough itself and keeping the cookies from spreading out too thin.

Firmer Dough

Firm dough prevents the cookies from spreading too much, which is why chilling the dough is a crucial step for cut-out and rolled cookies. "The colder and more solid the fat is, the less the cookie will spread," says food stylist and recipe developer Caitlin Haught Brown.

Chilling cookie dough before baking solidifies the fat in the cookies. As the cookies bake, the fat in the chilled cookie dough takes longer to melt than room-temperature fat. And the longer the fat remains solid, the less cookies spread.

Leaving your dough to rise for a longer time helps develop flavour in your finished bread too, so there are benefits to giving your dough plenty of time to rise.

If you take a “fast” recipe and let it rest overnight, you will get overproofed dough. After what's effectively eight times or more the expected time, you will have a rather yeasty tasting dough that has lost its inner structure - think of the way foam collapses after a while.

If you're checking on shaped dough for the second rise/proof, then it should also be about double in size. Feel: Bread dough that has successfully risen/proofed will spring back slowly when poked and leave an indent. If it snaps back too quickly, it needs more time.

Most pie dough/pastry benefits from a rest in the refrigerator as it allows the glutens in the flour to relax - this should help to give a more tender pie crust with less shrinkage. It can also give time for the liquids in the dough to be absorbed, giving slightly less dry spots in the pastry.