Crunchy Vs Soft Cookies: The Step You Must Follow For Your Recipe To Turn Out Right

When it comes to soft or crunchy cookies, everyone has a preference. Some enjoy the snap of a thin cookie, while others prefer the soft and chewy variety. While baking, cookies don't always come out of the oven with the texture you wanted, but adjusting the baking time and choosing the right ingredients may help you control your cookies' quality. We spoke with baking expert Hetal Vasavada, author of the "Milk & Cardamom" blog and her new cookbook, "Desi Bakes." Vasavada told us, "If you want a crunchier cookie, bake the cookies one to two minutes longer, but if you want softer cookies, pull them a few minutes early while the edges are set and the center is still a little gooey!"

Time in the oven is an easy and effective variable to control when baking since just a few minutes can make a noticeable impact on the cookies' texture. That said, diligently monitoring the oven and keeping a timer are essential. Pay attention to factors like height and color — paler, taller cookies are probably still soft, and browner, thinner cookies tend to be crispy. After removing them from the oven, as Vasavada recommended, "Always make sure to let the cookies cool on the pan for 10 minutes, as they will continue cooking in the residual heat!"

Many assume that hotter ovens correlate to a crispier cookie, but as Hetal Vasavada told us, "It's actually more about the ingredients!" The type of sugar, in particular, has a big role to play. "Adding corn syrup or having a higher brown sugar to white sugar ratio in your cookies will leave you with a softer cookie," she explained. "If you use only white sugar, it'll lead to crunchier cookies."  Brown sugar has a higher moisture content than white sugar, which generally equates to softer, moister cookies.

Yet other ingredients also play their parts, like butter. In fact, Challenge Butter is partnering with Cookies for Kids' Cancer to encourage charitable bake sales this holiday season. Bake sales present the perfect opportunity to practice baking and play around with sugar and butter ratios to test out different cookie textures. This chocolate chip cookie recipe has more brown sugar than white sugar and calls for melted butter, which leads to chewier cookies. Additionally, the baking soda in this recipe reacts with the acidic brown sugar and gives the cookies some height. On the other hand, these crispy oatmeal raisin cookies call for white sugar and room-temperature butter, so the dough spreads thin and browns quickly.