Does Resting Cookie Dough Actually Improve Flavor?
Of the mistakes you're probably making when baking chocolate chip cookies (or any type of cookie for that matter), not resting your dough is a probable one. Look, we totally get it — when you've just gone through the work of whipping up some delicious cookie dough (which you totally didn't sneak a forbidden bite from), the last thing you want is to wait longer for hot, gooey cookies. You likely want to put them straight in the oven and scent your kitchen with the heavenly perfume of baking sweets right away, then convey the hot cookies straight into your mouth. But, hear us out: resting your dough in the fridge for a while will actually make your cookies even better. Don't trust just us; take a bit of advice from Casey Nunes, education content coordinator at Wilton Sweet Studio.
"[I]n general, resting or chilling your cookie dough in the fridge for around 30 — 60 minutes will give you better cookies," Nunes explains. "That time spent resting/relaxing/chilling helps your dough ingredients blend together for better flavor, texture, and let cookies keep their shape in the oven so you don't end up with super spread out, thin cookie blobs." This is similar advice along the lines of our tips to bang your sheet pan to avoid flat cookies or use cake flour in your cookie dough for loftier specimens. Sure, it adds time to your baking process, but a little bit of rest will pay dividends in the form of even yummier cookies.
Resting dough has multiple benefits
Not only does resting your cookie dough result in better flavor because of giving ingredients time to harmonize, but it may also improve your baking process by avoiding common frustrations, Nunes tells us. "For recipes like rollout sugar cookies, chilling the dough before you start helps keep your dough from sticking to your hands and cookie cutters as well as helping shapes stay in their original form while baking. You can also chill your cookies after the shapes have been cut to reduce spread as well -– this is a trick we use at the Wilton Sweet Studio," she says.
The benefits of resting and chilling cookie dough are a matter of baking science. When you put cookie dough in the fridge, not only do the fats (like butter or vegetable shortening) stay solid for longer when they're finally put in the oven, but the dry ingredients like flour and sugar get a chance to really soak in the wet ingredients. This means that the overall dough is drier and therefore won't spread as much. This drying process also concentrates flavor, meaning that your cookies taste even yummier. Some baking pros, like Jacques Torres of "Nailed It!," swear by aging their cookie dough for upwards of 24 hours in the fridge to bring out the deepest flavors and produce the most divine crinkly texture. The verdict is still out on whether such longer rest times actually pay off, so you probably don't need more than an extra hour of patience.