The Quickest Way to Cookies That Don't Spread? Ice Water (2024)

There’s no worse feeling than measuring and mixing your way through a cookie recipe, eagerly anticipating a fresh and gooey cookie at the end of the process, only to run into the dreaded words: chill the dough overnight. What you hoped might be a quick baking project with instant gratification in the form of warm-from-the-oven cookies is now a two-day affair with delayed satisfaction. Sure, you can skip the chilling step and bake the dough right away, but doing so runs the risk of flat disks with dry edges and a brittle texture; a far cry for the plush, chewy cookies with fudge-like centers we all crave.

To bypass the long chilling time without sacrificing the quality of the cookies, I’ve started using a practical, albeit unconventional method of chilling: throwing the dough into a resealable plastic baggie and dunking it in ice water. It’s a technique I developed while writing a cookbook about cookies (aptly titled Cookies) when I desperately needed to save time as I tested and tweaked recipes. The ice bath trick significantly speeds up the chilling process, allowing you to make chocolate chip cookies perfumed with nutty brown butter and dotted with pockets of molten chocolate chips all in the course of an afternoon.

To understand why this method works, let’s shed some light on why we chill cookie dough in the first place. Chilling dough does several things: It provides ample time for the sugar to dissolve and the flour to hydrate, and some argue it helps deepen the flavor of the dough altogether. But the truth is, the primary reason bakers chill their dough is to prevent cookies from spreading too much. Chilling firms up the fat (usually butter) in the dough, ensuring that the dough doesn’t spread too quickly in the oven. For cookies that are high in butter content, this step is crucial and prevents them from melting into thin disks while baking. For most cookie recipes, it takes at least two hours in the fridge to fully chill the dough; an annoyingly long time when you’re in the mood to eat cookies ASAP. In the interest of (almost) instant gratification, I’ve fast-forwarded through this resting time with the help of some ice.

To pull this off with a batch of cookies, immediately after making the dough, transfer it into a gallon-size resealable baggie. If you prefer to use a reusable bag, feel free to do so; just make sure whatever bag you use is airtight so water doesn’t get in. Flatten the bagged cookie dough into a thin, even sheet that’s about half an inch thick, then set up an ice water bath that’s large enough to fit the dough. (If you don’t have a bowl that’s big enough, you can use a large roasting pan.) Flattening the cookie dough provides more surface area that comes into contact with the ice bath, shortening the time it takes to chill. Then submerge the dough in the ice water and let it chill. After 20 minutes the dough will be completely chilled and ready for baking. This method can be used for just about any drop cookie dough: soft sugar cookies and oatmeal cookies are prime.

You can scoop the dough directly out of the bag and onto a baking sheet, or you can prescore portions of dough directly in the bag. After flattening the dough, but before submerging it in ice water, press a chopstick into the dough to mark off a grid of square-shaped pucks of dough (not unlike the break-and-bake-style dough sold in grocery stores). Once the dough has chilled in the ice bath, you can easily break off the dough portions along the lines and bake them.

The next time you are baking cookies and come across a surprise chilling step, don’t fret: Instead of having to wait hours to bake off the dough, just set up an ice bath and give your dough a quick plunge. While it might be a bit more work than simply covering the dough and popping it in the fridge, sometimes you want cookies now and nothing else will do. By the time your oven is preheated, your ice-water-chilled dough will be ready to bake, and you’ll find yourself minutes away from a warm cookie.