5 Tips for Making Cookies From a Cookbook Author

Ina Garten is a fantastic cook and the author of her own cookbook. Her recipes are known as comfort recipes and provide practical advice that can help anyone improve their everyday cooking experience. Such tips can include replacing a dull vegetable peeler or how to freeze bread properly and are essential guidance for home cooks, especially when it comes to baking. Here are five invaluable baking tips for making great cookies from Ina Garten.

Prepare Butter and Eggs

Every home cook knows it takes a long time to get butter and eggs to room temperature, which is best for baking cookies. However, leaving those ingredients out for an hour isn’t quite enough.

Ina recommends leaving the butter and eggs out overnight. This way, the butter can mix with sugar properly and become light and fluffy.

Freeze Dough Before Baking

There is a super smart technique for baking cookies, and it’s all about freezing the dough for 15 minutes before making it into separate balls. This will allow any home cook to get the perfect texture for cooking.

There is also one other interesting technique that involves banging the cookie pans on the stovetop once every three minutes. This gives the cookies a crinkled quality.

Use an Ice Cream Scoop

Using a standard ice cream scoop to portion out cookie dough before baking is a true game-changer. It removes the guesswork and prevents home cooks from rolling uneven blobs of dough by hand.

Using the ice cream scoop results in cookies that are the same and can thus be baked evenly. It gives them a great visual appeal, and all it takes is to use a simple tool. It can also be used for measuring out muffin batter for uniformity and a professional finish.

Prepare the Ingredients

Ina Garten recommends measuring out all ingredients in advance before baking. This step is sometimes overlooked by home cooks but can make the cooking easier overall.

She also advises double-checking everything to make sure the components are all ready and accounted for. By portioning and preparing the ingredients ahead of time, the frustration of having a key ingredient missing is removed.