Cookie Dough Problems

December 17, 2023 2:14 PM

My brother has been baking cookies and has found that his dough is always super sticky. Why? I've noticed it occasionally in the past during the humid summer months, but never in the dry winter.

He had to add over a 1/3 cup of flour to the standard Toll House cookie dough per my suggestion. He didn't do that last time (I hadn't seen the dough) and the cookies were flat as pancakes (tasty though). Adding flour made everything turn out right today.

Only thing I can think of is the butter. I believe he's using store brand.

posted by kathrynm to Food & Drink (13 answers total)

A lot of recipes I use suggest putting the cookie dough in the fridge for 1-3 hours to make it easier to work with and less likely to spread in the oven. I don't have any theories about why it's suddenly happening to him, but if he hasn't tried cooling the dough it can really help.
posted by Eyelash at 2:33 PM on December 17, 2023

Just today I saw a thread on Reddit saying that many brands of butter have been increasing their water content recently, throwing off many bakers’ familiar recipes.
posted by profreader at 2:50 PM on December 17, 2023

It sounds like he's measuring the flour by volume, which is famously imprecise. Measuring by volume is more likely to result in too much flour and overly dry dough (because people inadvertently pack the measuring cup), but if he's using a recipe that was developed using volume measurements then all bets are off. Measuring by weight with a cheap digital scale is fun and easy, so even if it's not the solution to this particular problem it's likely to be an overall life upgrade.
posted by telegraph at 2:53 PM on December 17, 2023

In the pandemic, I did an informal bread-baking class led by a friend, and always had the wettest dough of anyone in the class, despite weighing all ingredients. Unless you're getting different results from the same recipe in the same kitchen, it could just be that the ambient humidity is regularly higher in his kitchen.
posted by EvaDestruction at 3:45 PM on December 17, 2023

Always sift flour and put dough in fridge for half hour before putting in oven
posted by Czjewel at 3:45 PM on December 17, 2023

A friend makes the Toll House original recipe with butter and her cookies were always flat (still delicious). My mother’s were never flat and she always used Crisco…and oatmeal. But then she put leftover rice in pancake batter.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:24 PM on December 17, 2023

I'd concurr about the butter being cold enough, and all the other potential reasons above. Cookies do seem better in general if not baked straight from mixing, so pre-cooking fridge time would be good regardless.

Putting the mix onto a cold cookie sheet (rather than preheated if you're doing multiple batches) can also help keep them thicker and less spread out.

Also checking the oven temperature itself is still accurate. Baking my long time cookie recipe in a new oven was how I knew its thermostat was wrong.

And yeah, if store butter is getting watered down, that's certainly going to change things too, as with accurate weighing rather than by approximate volume.
posted by many-things at 5:48 PM on December 17, 2023

My guess would be the brown sugar may be too dense, as too much sugar makes the dough sticky and the cookies flat. Perhaps he could try another type of brown sugar?

Possibly humid flour, if his house is humid. If not, measuring technique or the particular flour is resulting in bad proportions, for which the fix is to measure by weight instead.

Other possibilities: extra large eggs are adding more water, lower fat butter adding more water (though this would not be much) or over creamed butter and sugar.
posted by ssg at 6:30 PM on December 17, 2023

FWIW, my mom always used the recipe on the Nestle bag and her toll house cookies were always flat and yummy. We make them the same way. They’re flat as a pancake, yet have this crispy nanometer crust and are perfectly chewy inside. I prefer ‘em that way. Our friends love ‘em, too.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:34 PM on December 17, 2023

Definitely refrigerate the dough, overnight is good, but even an hour helps.
posted by theora55 at 9:16 PM on December 17, 2023

Alton Brown took apart the Tollhouse cookie recipe and came up with 3 different variants that move the cookies into different axes:
Thin
Chewy
Puffy

The thin variant is made with butter and has some extra liquid added to it. I would suspect that this is what's going on echoing the comment that some butter manufacturers are putting in more water.

This is an easy elimination point: replace the usual butter with a different brand of butter maybe something like Kerry Gold. If not, try replacing the butter with butter-flavored shortening, which has a different melting point.

In addition, you might also look at how he's measuring his ingredients and try measuring by weight instead of by volume.
posted by plinth at 8:16 AM on December 18, 2023

my sisters, both bakers, have hammered several cookie rules into my head:

1) always measure by weight. volume of flour is especially error prone.
2) always refrigerate your dough, preferably overnight. warm dough tends to bake flat.
3) use a standalone oven thermometer to ensure you're at the correct temperature. most home ovens do not heat to the temperature you ask them to.
posted by bruceo at 7:13 PM on December 18, 2023

My best guess is that it is the resting time (in the fridge). Yes, some butters have more water, but my gran sometimes made cookies with margarine, and they were still excellent. Most doughs need resting.
posted by mumimor at 2:32 PM on December 20, 2023