- Always use room-temperature butter and eggs for consistent cookie texture.
- Chill dough before baking to keep cookies from spreading too much.
- Use one dough to make multiple cookies and save time during the holidays.
Ina Garten, aka the Barefoot Contessa, has been a legend in the home cooking department since the 1970s. She’s an impressive chef, author and personality who specializes in classy comfort food. One aspect of her expertise is her cookies. Garten has appeared on talk shows to discuss the dos and don’ts of holiday baking, has included her favorite recipes in her books and online, and is widely considered an expert in cookie best practices. From all these sources, we’ve compiled some of Garten’s best tips for holiday cookies. Follow the path laid out by Garten, and you will find your holiday cookie game to be expert-level as well.
1. Butter Must Be Room Temperature
In a video showing how to make her chocolate chunk blondies, Garten says butter needs to be “really room temperature,” especially before creaming it in a mixer at the start of a cookie recipe. The creamed butter is important for distributing the fat throughout the recipe and keeping the texture consistent. Don’t forget about other ingredients, too. Eggs need to be room temperature because if they’re cold from the fridge, they’ll make the butter cold, too, and Garten says then “you’ve wasted all your time” getting the butter to room temperature.
One of the best sources for Ina Garten’s wisdom is the Barefoot Contessa blog. The “Ask Ina” section has a plethora of tips and tricks, including how to soften butter, which is simply to leave it out of the fridge. Garten sets her butter on the counter for several hours or overnight to ensure it’s room temperature, but if you have a butter-loving dog, putting it away in a cabinet works, too. She prefers unsalted Cabot butter. She says, no matter the brand, baking with unsalted butter is the best.
2. Just Add Water
While it can be scary to think of eyeballing ingredients, Garten, answering a question from someone who says their shortbread dough is too dry to roll out, says that if the dough is too dry, it’s OK to add a teaspoon or two of water until it’s easier to work with. You can follow the instructions to a T and still have varying results. One reason for dough dryness, Garten says, is that different butters have different water content, which leads some to be drier. Adding a little water until the dough is how it should be just evens everything out.
3. Dough Must Be Cold
There has been much debate about the correct temperature for cookie dough. While you may be anxious to pop cookies into the oven as soon as the dough is mixed, for many recipes, this can lead to a flat cookie. The fat in the butter melts faster than it should, and the ingredients don’t distribute evenly.
In an interview with the Today show on her tips for baking holiday cookies, Garten answers one of the anchor’s questions about dough coolness by telling her that, for the shortbread dough, at least, the sweet spot is to put it in the refrigerator for 15 to 30 minutes before baking. To make sure the dough is manageable, shape the cookies or roll and cut them before transferring them to the fridge. With shortbread, you may need to chill the dough before and after cutting.
However, in her Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe, Garten suggests freezing the dough for 15 minutes before baking. If the recipe doesn’t specify, erring on the side of cool but not frozen is the way to go.
4. Choose Chocolate Wisely
Garten doesn’t use chocolate chips; she uses chunks! Specifically, she said on her blog that she likes Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chunks, which are available pretty much everywhere. If she’s using bricks of chocolate for a recipe, she said that she likes Lindt, Callebaut or Valrhona chocolate, which, if she can’t get them at the regular grocery store, she finds at a specialty food and cooking store or orders online.
5. There Is a Right and a Wrong Salt
When it comes to baking and cooking, there are so many types of salt that it can be hard to know what the best choice is. On her blog, Garten says, “The kind of salt you use definitely makes a difference.” No matter what she’s cooking, she avoids table salt because of the metallic taste and because she says it “tastes extremely salty.” She uses Diamond Crystal kosher salt in all of her recipes. If you can’t get Diamond Crystal, she says the most important part is that the salt is kosher. She mentions that sea salt is less salty than kosher salt and the least salty salt is fleur de sel. As a result, sea salt and fleur de sel are her go-tos for finishing.
6. Use One Dough for Multiple Cookies
The holidays are a busy time, and making several types of cookies from scratch is labor-intensive. To cut down on time and cleaning, Garten said on the Today show that she uses her shortbread recipe to make several types of cookies. She cuts out the cookies and stores them in the fridge until they’re ready to bake. After assembling the dough, she rolls it out and cuts out several different shapes, which will each make for a different final product. She likes to finish star shapes with sugar and put little silver balls on wreaths. She makes heart-shaped shortbread and dips half of it in chocolate. Others are topped with a pecan, glued onto the cookie with chocolate.
One of Garten’s most famous recipes, and the one she said on Today and on her blog is her favorite, is her Linzer cookies, which use shortbread dough cut into circles. Half of the shortbread then has another circle cut out of the center and the two halves are sandwiched with raspberry jam and finished with confectioners’ sugar.
7. A Cookie Scoop Is Mandatory
To make drop cookies a uniform shape and size, Garten relies on a 1¾-inch ice cream or cookie scoop. She talks about her preference for size on her blog and in her giant crinkled chocolate chip cookie recipe. Using this-size cookie scoop, as opposed to a bigger or smaller one, produces perfectly sized cookies for packing and sharing. The rounded scoop ensures a soft, chewy middle, and having all the cookies the same size means they’ll all bake at the same rate.
8. Make Your Own Vanilla Extract
Vanilla extract can be expensive at the store and may not have as robust a flavor as if you made it yourself. In a Food Network segment, Garten walks us through her process for making her own vanilla. You need a jar tall enough to hold vanilla beans without bending. She uses 12 to 24 beans to fill up a large jar. Then she adds vodka to the jar until the beans are covered. She lets it infuse at room temperature for at least a month but says six months is better. The end product is vodka that is now vanilla extract. You can also snip off the end of a vanilla bean and squeeze out the seeds to use in recipes that need a big vanilla flavor.
9. Underbake Your Cookies
In the video for how to make chocolate chunk blondies, Garten says to underbake bars and cookies so you get a chewy, not crunchy or dry texture. To assess doneness, insert a toothpick. Garten says a “done” but not overdone cookie won’t make the toothpick come out totally clean. A wet toothpick would be too underdone, though, which is not healthy or structurally sound, so use discretion.
The Bottom Line
Ina Garten’s experience with cookies yields fantastic results, perfect for gifting or sharing at the holidays. Save time by preparing ingredients and using one base recipe for several cookies. Making sure to use high-quality ingredients such as chocolate or salt and keeping the dough the right consistency and temperature are the keys to creating delicious holiday desserts.
