Signs That Your Cookie Dough Contains Too Much Butter
Nothing beats taking the first bite of a freshly-baked chocolate chip cookie, especially one that's perfectly crispy on the outside and ooey-gooey on the inside. Texture is everything when it comes to baked goods, and cookies typically have many of them, depending on the type of dough, the mix-ins, and the amount of time it spends in the oven.
According to Yuppiechef's chocolate chip cookie troubleshooting guide, in order to achieve the perfect balance of crunchy, chewy, and soft, it's important to understand how your ingredients behave not only in the mixing bowl but in the oven. Though the flour, egg, butter, and sugar combination is as basic as baking ingredients get, getting the proportions right can be pretty complicated.
Confused as to how you somehow managed to burn your cookies only on the outside while they remained raw on the inside? As Yuppiechef highlights, this is a prime example of how including too much of one ingredient — in this case, butter — can easily lead to a crummy batch. Fortunately, there's an easy fix.
For butter in cookie dough, less is more
Due to the fact that butter has both liquid and solid properties at different temperatures, too much of it can make your cookies expand more than intended, Yuppiechef explained. An article from Kitchn further elaborated: "In its liquid state, butter mixes readily with both the sugar and flour, making for a softer dough that actually develops more gluten." Some of the best chocolate chip cookie recipes do call for melted butter, however, they also require chilling the dough before baking.
Melted butter, and therefore a warmer cookie dough, means the outside of the cookie will bake (and burn) faster than normal. Too much butter will only serve to increase this probability, so while you might have great-tasting cookie dough to start with, as soon as it spends some time in the oven, you'll be left with half-undercooked, half-overcooked cookies. To avoid this in the future, Yuppiechef advises chilling your dough ahead of baking and adds that you should decrease the amount of butter used if it keeps happening. As it turns out, butter may be more important to chocolate chip cookies than the actual chocolate chips!