The Step You Should Skip For Achieving The Crispiest Cookies

When baking a batch of cookies, sticks of butter need to be softened to properly incorporate with the other ingredients. For the most flavorful results, the best kind of butter for making cookies is European style, because its higher fat content achieves superior outcomes when creamed with sugar.

Many recipes then call for the dough to be refrigerated to allow the butter to firm up again before baking. This extra step is suggested to prevent the cookies from spreading, and to keep them round and tall. However, if your goal is the opposite, shaping and baking cookies immediately after preparing the dough will encourage them to spread out in the oven, resulting in more surface area for browning.

The downside to baking the dough right away is misshapen cookies. To help them return to a perfectly spherical form, simply use a biscuit cutter for the roundest cookies ever. While they are fresh from the oven and still warm, place a biscuit cutter over each cookie, and use a circular motion to encourage the uneven edges to push back into place. Even if you don’t have a biscuit cutter of the correct size, an inverted glass works just as well.