Chocolate Chip Cookie

The chocolate chip cookie is an American confection made by mixing pieces of chocolate into the dough and baking it. The dough spreads as it bakes, and some cookies come out with toasty edges and soft centers. Together with the parts where the chocolate is mixed in, a single cookie offers several different textures. The cookie did not begin with purpose-made chips. The Toll House recipe (the proportions of ingredients and the method of preparation), which called for chopping a chocolate bar, later led to the sale of baking chips and to recipes printed on the packaging.

Creaming butter and sugar, then resting the dough

A typical order is to cream soft butter with sugar to work in fine air bubbles, add the eggs, mix in the flour, and finally scatter in the chocolate. In formulas with several eggs, adding them one at a time makes the water in the eggs and the fat in the butter less likely to separate. After the flour goes in, the dough is mixed only until the flour absorbs the moisture, then mixing stops rather than continuing to work the dough. While the dough rests in the refrigerator, the sugar dissolves, the flour absorbs more moisture, and the fat firms up, all of which changes how the dough spreads in the oven.

During baking, the fat and sugar melt and the dough spreads. Moisture then escapes from the edges, and the egg and flour components set with the heat, so the outline holds. In a cookie with little water, the starch as a whole does not gelatinize the way it does in bread. The texture changes with the combination of the proportions of sugar, fat, and flour and the baking time and temperature.

Changing the texture with sugar, fat, and thickness

Brown sugar, which contains molasses, is used for a soft, chewy result. A formula based on granulated sugar, with less moisture and slow baking, moves the cookie toward a dry, light texture.

Fat is another ingredient that changes the cookie’s shape. Butter melts at a lower temperature than shortening, so it tends to flow before the dough sets and pushes the cookie toward a thin spread. Shortening is a fat that helps keep the cookie thick. That said, a soft cookie depends not only on the choice of fat but also on reducing the sugar to adjust the spread and on baking so that the center does not dry out too much.

Even with the same dough, the thickness changes depending on whether the cookie is baked in the shape of a drop cookie, scooped and dropped onto the baking sheet, or pressed flat before baking. Thin edges bake quickly while moisture stays in a thick center, so a single cookie can have two textures. With cold dough, the fat takes longer to start melting, which makes it easier to limit spreading.

Some methods brown part of the butter to add a toasty flavor. Because browning evaporates the water, some formulas use the rest of the butter unbrowned to keep the moisture the dough needs to hold together.

Uniform chips and chopped chocolate bars

Uniform chips give a result in which each individual piece stands out. Chopping a chocolate bar produces a mix of large chunks and fine shavings. The small pieces work their way into the dough, while the larger pieces form spreading pools of melted chocolate. Even with the same amount of chocolate, the way it is cut and distributed changes the intensity and mouthfeel of each bite.

Even though the cookie is named for chips, a chopped chocolate bar is an ingredient that fits the way the cookie began. Combinations of pieces and dough have also multiplied, such as white chocolate with macadamia nuts, or a cocoa dough with dark chocolate.

Checking the texture after cooling

For formulas meant to keep a soft center, one method is to take the cookies out when the edges start to brown and the middle still looks soft, and then let them cool on the baking sheet. If they are baked until firm while still warm, they will be hard all the way to the center once they cool. Because the state of the chocolate also changes with temperature, the softness straight from the oven and the texture of a cooled cookie are checked separately. By changing the formula and the baking method, you can adjust the toastiness of the edges, the moist texture of the center, and how much the chocolate pieces keep their shape.

The Toll House recipe and the spread of baking chips

The Toll House recipe that Ruth Graves Wakefield published in 1938 called for chopping a chocolate bar into small pieces and mixing them in. There is a story that she added the chocolate by mistake, expecting it to melt throughout the dough, but this does not match the deliberate idea she herself later described. An advertisement using the same cookie name exists from 1928, but it is unknown whether that cookie kept distinct pieces of chocolate as today’s does.

In 1939, Nestlé asked Wakefield to let it print the recipe on its packaging. By 1940 it had introduced a scored chocolate bar that was easy to break into pieces, and it later mass-produced chip-shaped morsels. A 1941 company recipe booklet is also preserved at The Henry Ford museum. Spread through a recipe for home baking and the commercialization of its ingredients, the cookie is also said to have been popular during the Second World War as a treat sent to soldiers.

Premixed dough and specialty shops’ own styles

After packaged chips and printed recipes helped people make the cookie at home, refrigerated premixed dough that could be scooped and baked without mixing ingredients at home, and mixes combining flour and chips, further widened the occasions for baking. While home formulas and ingredients spread, specialty shops selling baked cookies also increased.

In 1975, Wally Amos began selling small, bite-size chocolate chip cookies on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The current company history of Famous Amos also names this bite size as a defining feature from its founding.

Debbi Fields, who opened a shop in Palo Alto in 1977, made warm, soft, freshly baked cookies her shop’s hallmark.

Then, in New York in 1995, Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald of the bakery Levain made large chocolate and walnut cookies to take to their athletic training, and they began selling them in the shop as well.

Amos’s small bites, Fields’s soft cookies sold in the shop, and Levain’s thick, oversized cookies are examples of specialty shops giving the cookie, which is baked on sheet pans at home, their own distinctive sizes and textures.

Cookie dough mixed into ice cream

The dough itself also found its way into another dessert. Ben & Jerry’s states that in 1984, at its Burlington shop and at a customer’s suggestion, it mixed unbaked chocolate chip cookie dough into vanilla ice cream, and that after adjustments for production it launched the flavor in pint containers in 1991. It is an example of the cookie expanding from a baked good studded with chocolate pieces into a dessert in which the texture of the dough is enjoyed inside cold, milky ice cream. The dough in this product is made specifically to be eaten in ice cream and is not treated the same as home dough intended for baking.

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