The temperature you should bake cookies at depends on the texture that you want the cookies to have. However, the standard baking temperature for cookies is 350 degrees Fahrenheit. While 350 degrees F is standard, you can also bake cookies at 325 degrees F.
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).
- Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.
- In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and white sugar until well blended.
- Bake for 15 to 17 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are lightly toasted.
Generally, cookies are baked in a moderate oven — 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) — for 8 to 12 minutes, depending on the size of the cookie. For chewy cookies, allow them to cool on the baking sheet for 3 to 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.
For all cookies, preheat your oven to 350 F before baking and line the pan(s) with parchment paper or use a silicone pan liner. While some cookie recipes call for other baking temperatures, 350 F is a good place to start if you don’t have the temperature and bake time handy.
For those ooey, gooey chocolate chip cookies, 375 degrees Fahrenheit is your sweet spot. It’s the perfect temperature to ensure super crispy exterior edges, while leaving the center slightly underdone and, thus, doughy and fudgey.
If you choose to bake your cookies at 325 degrees, know that your cookies will still bake evenly. However, your cookies will cook at a slower pace, which will result in them being softer and chewier than if they were baked at 350 degrees.
Cookie chemistry: We’re taking a 180° turn from our crunchy cookies, substituting higher-moisture brown sugar and butter for their lower-moisture counterparts: granulated sugar and vegetable shortening. That, plus a shortened baking time, yields a cookie that’s soft and chewy all the way through.
Place one baking sheet at a time onto center rack of preheated 350 degree F oven. Bake until cookies are golden around the edges, still have pale tops, and are soft in the center, about 8 to 10 minutes. (Do not overbake!
The simple answer to this question is, meet in the middle. Cookies should (almost) always be baked on the middle rack of the oven. The middle rack offers the most even heat and air circulation which helps cookies bake consistently.
“When you bake at a lower temperature, you will get that perfect cookie with a soft center and crisp exterior,” she adds. Just make sure you increase baking time by a couple of minutes or you will end up with gooey underbaked cookies.
The short answer is, you can expect to bake cookies at 350 degrees F for between 8 to 12 minutes. That said, a lot needs to be put into consideration when determining how long to bake your cookies – the type of cookies, the size of the cookies, and the content in the dough.
Mistake: When cookies turn out flat, the bad guy is often butter that is too soft or even melted. This makes cookies spread. The other culprit is too little flour—don’t hold back and make sure you master measuring. Finally, cookies will also flatten if placed and baked on hot cookie sheets.
Bake at 375 degrees F until golden and tender, 12 to 15 minutes. For Crispy Cookies: Bake cookies at 425 degrees F until golden brown and crispy on the outside, 8 to 10 minutes.
Because the higher temperature causes the cookies to firm faster (aka set faster) and this prevents spreading. Cookies baked at 375 degrees F will have a thicker, chewier bottom.
A low temperature and longer baking time yields crisper, thinner cookies; a higher temperature and shorter baking time makes softer, thicker cookies.
Issues with cracking usually derive from the sugar coating, not enough or expired baking powder or baking soda, or the oven temperature isn’t hot enough. Solution: Granulated sugar is more effective at drying the surface than powdered sugar.
Cookies spread because the fat in the cookie dough melts in the oven. If there isn’t enough flour to hold that melted fat, the cookies will over-spread. Spoon and level that flour or, better yet, weigh your flour. If your cookies are still spreading, add an extra 2 Tablespoons of flour to the cookie dough.
If they are something like a butter cookie, make sure you are baking at a low temperature – 200 – 250 degrees F – so that the cookies bake through but do not colour or are just golden.
If your cookies repeatedly turn out flat, no matter the recipe, chances are your oven is too hot. Here’s what’s happening. The butter melts super quickly in a too-hot oven before the other ingredients have firmed up into a cookie structure. Therefore, as the butter spreads so does the whole liquidy cookie.
Baking cookies quickly in a hot oven – at 375 degrees F as opposed to a lower temperature – will make for soft results. They’ll bake fast instead of sitting and drying out in the oven’s hot air. Ever so slightly underbaking your cookies will give you softer results than cooking them the full amount the recipe says.
Vinegar is a surprisingly common ingredient in baked goods, considering that it has such a sharp flavor. But as an acid, vinegar is often included in cake and cookie batters to react with baking soda and start the chemical reaction needed to produce carbon dioxide and give those batters a lift as they bake.
The most common cause is using a different flour than usual, such as cake flour, and measuring flour with too heavy a hand. Using larger eggs than called for can make cookies cakey, as will the addition of milk or more milk or other liquids than specified.
Bake at 375 degrees F until golden and tender, 12 to 15 minutes. For crispy-cakey cookies: Bake the cookies at 425 degrees F until golden and crunchy on the outside, 8 to 10 minutes.
Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you’re more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.
If you substitute bread flour, which is made from a different strain of wheat and is higher in protein, your cookies will be too hard. If you use cake or pastry flour, which are softer, your cookies will be fragile and crumbly.
For more even baking, position oven rack at the center of the oven and bake one sheet of cookies at a time. If you prefer to bake two sheets, space racks so oven is divided into thirds and switch cookie sheets top to bottom and back to front halfway through baking.
8 Ways to Prevent Cookies from Burning on the Bottom
- Sugar Control.
- The Right Baking Sheet Color.
- Ungreased Cookie Sheets.
- Parchment-Lined Cookie Sheets.
- Oven Rack Position.
- One Sheet at a Time.
- The Sacrificial Cookie.
- Baking Time.
Even heat created by the air circulating in convection yields the irresistible combination of crunchy and gooey – and some say it’s the secret to the perfect cookie. But, if you prefer a softer, chewy cookie, use Bake mode without convection.
Conclusion. The baking time of your cookies will be the same whether you bake one tray or four trays — assuming your oven is large enough to handle them. Oven racks should be evenly spaced and at least several inches away from the heating element.
Moreover, the lower the oven temperature, the more evenly the cookie bakes, with less of a contrast between the edges and the center. In fact, when the oven temperature gets low enough (around 275°F (135°C) and below), you completely lose any contrast, producing a cookie that’s more or less homogenous across the board.
Keep in mind that if you adjust the size of the cookie from the original recipe, you will need to adjust the baking time, so watch them carefully. The smaller the cookie, the shorter time in the oven.
Chocolate chip cookies are done when they have a firm golden edge or bottom and appear slightly set on top. If the edges become dark brown, they are overbaked. If edges aren’t golden and tops are soft and shiny, bake a little longer.
How To Make Thicker Cookies (Using 10 Simple Tips)
- 1 – Refrigerate Your Cookie Dough.
- 2 – Use Room-Temperature Butter.
- 3 – Use the Correct Fat.
- 4 – Focus on Your Mixing Technique.
- 5 – Add Less Granulated Sugar.
- 6 – Add More Flour.
- 7 – Use Bleached Flour.
- 8 – Check Your Rising Agent.
Chilling cookie dough
- Chilling cookie dough for just 30 minutes makes a big difference. The cookies pictured above are the same size, weight-wise.
- The longer you chill cookie dough, the smaller the changes become.
- Over time, chilling cookie dough produces cookies with darker color and more pronounced flavor.
Yolks, where all of the fat is in an egg, increase richness, tenderness and flavor. Therefore, if you put an extra egg, you will get a chewier cookie. I do it all the time. If you put less, you will get a more crumbly cookie.
I tried 385 degrees, 395 degrees, 400 degrees, 410 degrees, and even 425 degrees in a quest to find the ultimate baking temperature for these chocolate chip cookies. The winner was 400 degrees! It allowed the cookies to get those crispy edges while keeping the middle a perfect texture.
One reason cookies spread: oven temperature
“For this practically perfect tray, we dropped the temperature to 300°F, and extended the baking time: 22 minutes for chewy, 30 minutes for crisp.
How to Make Soft Cookies
- Use brown sugar instead of white sugar.
- Use cake flour.
- Bake at a low temperature.
- Don’t overbake them.
- Eat them the day they’re baked.
- Store them in an airtight container.
- Store them with a piece of white bread.
- Steam them in the microwave.
They go from soft to hard because they start to dry out, and it begins as soon as you pull them from the oven. (Yikes.) Whatever moisture is left in the cookies is always in a state of evaporation. At the same time, the sugars and starches are solidifying.
You overwork the dough.
If you mix (or roll out) cookie dough too much, you’ll add excess air to the dough, causing it to rise and then fall flat in the oven. Overmixing the dough can also lead to excess gluten development, resulting in dense cookies.
When cookie dough is sticky, it’s generally because there’s too much moisture. You need to get a good balance of the dry and wet ingredients so that the dough isn’t too wet or too dry. Having cookie dough that’s too wet results in cookies that spread out far too much during baking.
Water vapor escaping from the dough in combination with the carbon dioxide released by our baking soda is ultimately what makes our cookies light and airy.
Not Enough Flour
If your cookies are flat, brown, crispy, and possibly even a bit lacy around the edges, that means you need to add flour to your dough for the next batch. Our cookies were brittle and greasy and cooked much faster than the other dough balls on the sheet.
How to Make Crispy Cookies
- Use a higher ratio of white to brown sugar. While brown sugar keeps your cookies moist and soft, white sugar and corn syrup will help your cookies spread and crisp in the oven.
- Don’t chill your dough. To achieve a crispy cookie, skip the rest in the fridge.
- Smash your dough and bang the pan.
350° is the standard temp for a cookie, and it’s a great one. Your cookies will bake evenly and the outside will be done at the same time as the inside. Baking at 325° also results in an evenly baked cookie, but the slower cooking will help yield a chewier cookie.
The eggs coagulate at certain temperatures, the starches gelatinize at certain temperatures, and the proteins from the flour are temperature dependent, too. Once you reach a temp where those things are accomplished, your cookie is done! Chocolate chip cookies are done between 175 and 185°F (79 and 85°C).
Chill your cookie dough! The dough is extremely soft due to the creamy peanut butter, eggs, and butter and if it’s not cold going into the oven, the cookies will spread all over your baking sheet. I chilled this cookie dough for 24 hours and my cookies were soft, thick perfection.
Use a small amount of an acidic condiment such as lemon juice or vinegar to neutralise the soda. If the recipe has chocolate, simply add half a teaspoon of cocoa powder to it. Buttermilk can also be used to counter the pungent taste of baking soda.
So one way to get the best of both: Use half butter and half shortening. By the way “butter” here is butter. Real butter, not margarine. And “shortening” here is Crisco baking sticks.
Place one baking sheet at a time onto center rack of preheated 350 degree F oven. Bake until cookies are golden around the edges, still have pale tops, and are soft in the center, about 8 to 10 minutes. (Do not overbake! They will firm up more during cooling.)
Cookie chemistry: We’re taking a 180° turn from our crunchy cookies, substituting higher-moisture brown sugar and butter for their lower-moisture counterparts: granulated sugar and vegetable shortening. That, plus a shortened baking time, yields a cookie that’s soft and chewy all the way through.
For softer, chewier cookies, you will want to add much less granulated sugar, slightly more brown sugar, and a fair bit less butter. For cakey cookies, you will often be including even less butter and sugar.
Adding more moisture to your dough in the form of extra butter, egg yolks, or brown sugar will make your cookies even softer. We go into even more detail on how to achieve chewy perfection here.
Brown sugar, meanwhile, is dense and compacts easily, creating fewer air pockets during creaming—that means that there’s less opportunity to entrap gas, creating cookies that rise less and spread more. With less moisture escaping via steam, they also stay moist and chewy.
O’Brady is specific that the butter be melted slowly, over low heat to prevent any evaporation. In its liquid state, butter mixes readily with both the sugar and flour, making for a softer dough that actually develops more gluten (thanks to the butter’s moisture hydrating the flour).
Most cookies have top crusts that remain relatively soft and flexible as the cookies set during baking. However, if the top surface dries out before the cookie is finished spreading and rising, it hardens, cracks, and pulls apart, producing an attractive crinkly, cracked exterior.
Generally for 1 or 2-inch-deep pans, you will fill them 1/2 full of batter. For pans that are 3 or 4-inch-deep, the batter needs to be about 2/3 full.
That, or the dough wasn’t cool enough before baking. Warm cookie dough or excess butter will cause the cookies to spread too much, baking quickly on the outside but remaining raw in the middle. Next time, chill your cookies in the fridge for 10 minutes before you bake them. If the problem persists, use less butter.