Yes, You Can Freeze Cookie Dough to Speed Up Your Chill Time—Here's How (2024)

FAQs

Yes, You Can Freeze Cookie Dough to Speed Up Your Chill Time—Here's How? ›

Place the cookie dough in the freezer for one-quarter of the recommended refrigerator time. The dough can be wrapped in plastic, scooped into balls for baking on a cookie sheet, or left in the mixing bowl, covered.

Flour contains naturally-occurring enzymes, which break down as the dough chills, leading to increased browning. The sugar in the dough absorbs the moisture from the flour, causing the cookie to brown and caramelize. Refrigerating the dough allows the flour to fully hydrate and helps to make the cookie dough firmer.

How Long Should I Chill Cookie Dough? Anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. The longer you chill the dough, the more flavor will develop. The flour will also absorb more of the moisture so the thicker and chewier the final texture will be.

In most cases, I prefer to freeze cookie dough over freezing baked cookies. That way, you still get the nice homemade smell and softness of the cookies when they come out of the oven. But if you want to get the whole job done, you can certainly bake the cookies, then freeze them later.

Here's what our Test Kitchen recommends when quickly chilling cookie dough in the freezer: Place the cookie dough in the freezer for one-quarter of the recommended refrigerator time. The dough can be wrapped in plastic, scooped into balls for baking on a cookie sheet, or left in the mixing bowl, covered.

The colder your dough is before it heads into the oven, the less it will spread during baking, which makes for loftier cookies. The chilling phase also gives the flour in your dough time to hydrate, just like pie dough, which translates into a cookie that's more chewy than cakey.

Preheat your oven and space out the still-frozen dough balls on your baking sheet, all according to your chosen recipe—you don't need to increase the oven temperature or the spacing between dough scoops. Just plan to add 1-2 minutes to the overall baking time—12-13 minutes instead of 10-11, for instance.

Freezing cookie dough gives the butter in the dough the chance to become firmer. Colder butter disperses through the cookie more slowly causing a more structured and complex cookie. Cold butter also causes the cookie to spread less creating a final product that is softer and meltier.

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.

Should I cover my cookie dough in the fridge? ›

Most cookie dough can be refrigerated, well-wrapped, for 3-5 days before baking. If you want to make it farther in advance, freeze the dough. You can either freeze the entire brick of dough or divide it into portions for quick baking.

It is probably because fridges are a drying environment with circulated cold air, and the cookies were not wrapped correctly. Always double-wrap in plastic food wrap and aluminum foil to prevent dry cookie dough.

Delicate cookie doughs/batters don't hold up well in the freezer. For example, I avoid freezing French macarons batter, madeleine batter, lace cookies batter, and chocolate-swirled meringue batter. Even if you let the doughs/batter thaw first, the results will not be the same.

Drop cookies, like chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin, are the easiest to freeze. To do so, place portioned dough in a single layer on a parchment-lined baking sheet and freeze until firm, then you can transfer the dough to zipper-lock bags, says Schreiber.

Frozen cookie dough balls do not need to be thawed out before baking unless you've been given specific instructions that say to do so. For many cookie doughs, for example, shortbread-style or slice-and-bake cookies, baking immediately from frozen will give you the best results.

While freezing baked cookies is an option to have ready-to-serve cookie on hand, freezing the raw cookie dough allows for fresher-tasting cookies when baked, as the dough hasn't gone through the baking process yet.

Refers to food that is thoroughly cooled in a refrigerator compartment, but is not frozen. Proper chilling of food is usually accomplished within a temperature range of 33°F to 42°F.