This Is the Best Way to Scoop up Cookies.
All cookies are beautiful just the way they are. Cookies are one of my top three favorite things and I almost never turn them down, and certainly not because of their appearance. But there’s a tendency to decorate cookies with drips, and that’s all about making sure your cookies have perfectly jagged, wrinkled tops. Turns out there’s a “better” way to scoop up cookies to achieve this look.
Typically, chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, and often sugar cookies are drop-shaped cookies. Drip cookies are any cookies that you don’t need to cut or cut into slices – you “drop” the dough onto the baking sheet in small mounds. You can also roll out the portioned dough in your hands to form dough balls before baking for perfectly smooth, round cookies. I grew up with the belief that chocolate chip cookies should look torn and that they should be perfect in their irregular shape. Supposedly, my parents gave me a metaphor I could refer to for practicing self-love, and since then, I’ve always preferred to scoop up bumpy cookies over smooth ones. Apparently I’m on trend right now.
My tried-and-true method for making scalloped biscuits was simple: scoop up the cookie dough with two forks, or as I like to call it, fluff the dough with a fork. Take two forks and knead the dough a little. Use the tines of both forks to gather as much dough as you like into a bun. Lift and place the checkered mound on a baking sheet. The dough is loosened and textured by the teeth, and it’s done in one go, making it reliably fast.
I wanted to see how my method fits in with other possible ways cookie lovers throw dough onto the baking sheet. I have tried several different methods for shaping pre-baked items. From store-bought cookie dough magazine: Cut, cut and split (more on splitting later), rolled and split and rolled. I also wanted to replicate cookie dough from a bowl, however I didn’t want to jeopardize experimenting with another dough, so I put the other half of the same log of store-bought dough into the bowl and kneaded it upside down. shapeless cookie dough. From a bowl: with a fork, spoon, twisted, divided and twisted. I repeated the “roll and split” methods (on the second tray I wrote “roll and split” but it’s the same method) and the “roll” methods on each sheet tray mainly to compare them with the other four.
The “split” method I mentioned above is a shaping technique that I came across online. It involves rolling the dough into a ball, tearing the ball in half, pressing the two halves with the torn sides together, and then placing the dough, torn side up, on a baking sheet. This is supposedly the best way to get the much sought after, wrinkled-top, uneven cookie.
I have found that “chopped and split” from a log makes one of the two most cavernous cookies. Fork in the bowl pulled another spiky cookie. “Rolled and Divided” yielded one fluted cookie and one nearly smooth cookie on the other baking sheet. I found this discrepancy surprising, especially since I took care of both cookies to make sure I didn’t crush the cookie by tearing the balloon in half. This was tricky because the cookie dough can become quite soft after being rolled in warm hands for a few seconds. “Sliced only” came with the next most wavy, followed by “spoons” from the bowl, and the most consistently smooth cookies, log and bowl, were “rolled”. (No surprises.)
My cookie-shaping experiment showed that there are three ways to make deliciously cool cookies, but only one of them is the fastest, easiest, and easiest. While “cut and divided” and “rolled and divided” were contenders for the top, if you have a bowl of cookie dough and want spiked cookies time and time again, it needs to be branched. The fork method is consistent and fast compared to the “scroll and split” method, which requires two additional steps. That’s extra time spent on both of these areas, and depending on how warm the dough is, you can end up with very inconsistent textures on your cookies. (Note that this experiment is for homemade cookies baked in small batches. Large production bakeries work with huge batches and will prepare the cookies in a variety of ways to ensure speed and consistency.)
If you happen to be working with a store-bought cookie dough log, the cut and divide method is excellent, and I’d say as fast as branching. The dough does not heat up in your hands and does not shrink when rolled, which allows the material to remain aerated and split more unevenly. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you can always pour the dough into a bowl and grab it with a fork at any time.
While this discovery may have shocked your world, let everyone know that these are all ways to get beautiful cookies. I even re-evaluated the rolled cookie because it was the only one that had a nice cracked surface. Depending on the recipe used and other factors, the cookies may come out thicker or flatter.