A Guide to The Most Common Cookie Ingredients

When baking cookies, knowing when and why to use a certain ingredient and which exact variation is the right one can make all the difference between a cookie mess and a delicious, irresistible dessert.

Below is a comprehensive Guide to the Most Common Cookie Ingredients. It includes information about the different varieties of each ingredient, when and why it is used, where you can purchase harder to find ingredients, and recommendations for which brands to use in which situations.

Flour

• All-purpose Flour: All-purpose flour is in the US is a blend of hard wheat (higher gluten) and soft wheat (lower gluten). Because of this, it is suitable for all different kinds of baked goods, including cookies, pastries, some cakes, and pizza.
• Whole Wheat: Whole Wheat flour is flour ground using the entire kernel of the grain, including the bran, which reduces gluten development and leads to a heavier or denser baked good.
• Cake Flour: Finely milled soft wheat flour with low gluten content. It is more suitable for very light cakes, like angel food cake.
• Bleached Flour: Bleached flour is flour that uses chemical agents to bleach the flour to give it a whiter color, accelerate aging, and provide a softer texture. It has been banned in the UK, Canada, and many European countries since the 1990s, among other countries across the world.
• Recommended Brand: I’ve used many different brands, including store-bought brands with good results, but I most often go back to King Arthur Flour because it has a great reputation, it is consistent, and it is easy to find in many stores.

Sugar

• Granulated Sugar: Made from the juice of sugar cane with molasses as a byproduct. Granulated sugar affects the consistency of a cookie and causes cookies to spread. Sugar cannot be easily reduced in cookie recipes because it will cause the cookie to become more cake-like and less chewy.
• Light Brown vs. Dark Brown Sugar: Molasses gives brown sugar its color and flavor. Dark brown sugar has a higher percentage of molasses compared with light brown sugar. Light and dark brown sugar can most times be substituted 1 for 1. The biggest difference between the two is the color.
• Turbinado Sugar: Sometimes called Sugar In The Raw, these are larger brown granules of sugar, great for sprinkling on top of cookies, muffins, or other baked goods. It can be found in many grocery stores in the baking section.
• Super Fine Sugar: Used less often for cookies. Super fine sugar is finer grains of sugar, more often used in cakes to achieve a lighter texture.
• Powdered Sugar: Also called Confectioner’s Sugar, it is even finer than super fine sugar, giving it a powdery soft texture. It is ideal for making icing for decorating cookies or frosting for sandwich cookies.

Leavening Agents:

Baking Soda: Baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, is a leavening agent that, when combined with an acid solution such as yogurt, sour cream, lemon juice, vinegar, maple syrup, produces carbon dioxide, a gas that causes baked goods to rise. For this reason, once the baking soda and an acid along with a liquid comes into contact, it’s important to get the baked good in the oven quickly.

Baking soda is strong, and too much of it can result in a metallic, soapy aftertaste. Baking soda also helps to give cookies that classic crinkly cookie look, rather than having a round domed top.

Baking Powder: Baking Powder is also a leavening agent, but it contains both baking soda and cream of tartar (acid). Once it comes in contact with a liquid, it starts to react. But most baking powders are double acting. Meaning the first reaction comes when it is mixed into a liquid, and the second when it is exposed to heat, like your oven.

Eggs: It is helpful to have eggs at room temperature for many types of baked goods, but for most cookies, especially drop cookies made in one bowl, it does not have a big impact. In cookies, eggs add predominately fat and flavor, whereas in many cakes, they help to create air and a sturdy structure. I recommend using pasture-raised eggs (the hens are given larger amounts of free open space to roam). I’ve also found that pasture-raised eggs are easier to crack without getting eggshells everywhere compared with basic white eggs.

Salt

Salt: Salt balances and brings out flavor in baked goods and savory dishes. Many bakers, like those at King Arthur or Samin Nosrat, recommend using non-iodized salt, which is what I use. But I’ve baked with both types, and the difference is not noticeable, particularly in cookies. Most cookie recipes call for regular table salt.

Flaky Sea Salt: This type of salt is salt that is flaked into wide, thin sheets (compared to a single granule of salt). I use Morton’s Sea Salt Flakes, which is a great flaky salt for finishing some cookies. It can be expensive, but a single box will last you years, and it is well worth it if you bake somewhat regularly.

Tip: When finishing a cookie with flaky sea salt, add the salt after the cookie has baked right after it comes out of the oven. The salt will stick to the still quite warm cookie. This way, you can cover more surface area of the cookie compared with topping the cookie before baking.

Vanilla

Vanilla Extract: This version of vanilla is most often used in cookie recipes. It can be expensive, and if you bake somewhat regularly, you may want to consider buying a large bottle of vanilla extract at Costco or another wholesale store, which is more economical than the small bottles at a typical grocery store.

Vanilla Paste: This is becoming more common in the baking section. It is a combination of vanilla extract and vanilla bean seeds.

Vanilla Beans: These can be quite expensive and hard to find, but they are one of the very best ingredients out there. There is no dessert that I like more than a high-quality pure vanilla bean ice cream. Sometimes, you can find bottles of vanilla beans at Costco for a very good price compared with most grocery stores. To use vanilla beans cut a slit down the middle of the bean and scrape out the seeds (shown above).

Imitation Vanilla: Don’t confuse this for vanilla extract. It has more of a “funfetti cake” taste and should not be substituted for vanilla extract.

Chocolate

Where to Find: Chocolate can vary widely in terms of quality. The two brands that I return to over and over are Ghirardelli and Guittard. Both are some of the original chocolate companies, and they produce a better-quality chocolate. Yet they are still readily available at most stores. The chocolate from these brands melts easier and better than other brands, and it tastes quite a bit better. They can be more expensive than store-bought brands, or Nestlé, but they are worth it.

Not all cookies need these more expensive types of chocolate. In my recipes, I specify where a high-quality brand is needed or recommended or when a store-bought brand will do the trick.

Chocolate Chips vs. Chocolate Bars (chopped chocolate): Some cookies call for chocolate chips, whereas others use chocolate bars chopped up into small bits. Chocolate chips are designed to hold their shape, whereas chopped chocolate from chocolate bars melts more readily into the cookie. Both are great but yield different results.

I love a standard chocolate chip cookie with bittersweet chocolate chips, but I am very partial to these Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies with Chopped Chocolate where the cookie dough is more of a vehicle for the thin melty bits of chopped chocolate.

Varieties of Chocolate: Milk Chocolate, Semi-Sweet, Bittersweet, and Dark Chocolate can often be used interchangeably depending on your taste preferences. Most cookies do best with something darker than milk chocolate chips (it's richer), but really anything works, and you can use what you have on hand or what you prefer.

Other Less Common Ingredients

Cream of Tartar: Cream of Tartar is a byproduct of fermenting grapes, and it is most commonly used in baking to stabilize whipped egg whites as you would in meringue, like these Lemon Meringue Pie Cookies. But it’s also used in cookies like snickerdoodle cookies to add tang and a chewy texture by preventing sugar from crystallizing.         

Oats: Old-fashioned rolled oats are commonly used in many cookie recipes, like Maple Oatmeal Cookies. I’ve found over many years of making granola that some brands of oats are much drier and brittle than others. I like to use Trader Joe’s, Costco, or Quaker Oats. I try to steer clear of the oats from Whole Foods.

Berries and Jam: Berries are tricky to incorporate into cookies because they are fresh and have high water content, which affects the consistency of cookies. It can certainly be done, like in these Lemon Blueberry Cookies, but the cookies are typically best eaten the same day, or the following day at the latest.

Dehydrated (Freeze Dried) Berries: The easier way to incorporate real berries into cookies is to use dehydrated berries. You can now find them at most grocery stores, though I find that Trader Joe’s typically has the best price (some local grocery stores charge quite a bit). This allows you to add real berries to the cookie dough without affecting the wet-dry ingredient ratio. I’ve used them to make both Strawberry Shortbread Cookies and Strawberry Cheesecake Cookies with cream cheese.

Jam: Jam is also a tricky ingredient to incorporate into cookie dough because of its liquid content, but swirls of jam in a cookie like these Strawberry Jam Cookies can be super tasty and a great accompaniment to a sweet cookie dough.

Cinnamon: Cinnamon is the only spice that I’ve found thus far that makes a huge difference to use a high-quality brand. Low-quality cinnamon can really ruin an entire dessert, which can be quite upsetting when you’ve just spent hours working on the perfect Apple Pie. I’ve used a type of cinnamon called Ceylon Cinnamon for many years now and love it. It’s sold by a company called Simply Organic at Whole Foods and other specialty retailers, though I’m sure many other brands have a high-quality version.

Cream Cheese: Cream cheese can be used both in cookie dough as well as in a frosting or sandwich cookie filling, like these Lemon Sandwich Cookies. When added to cookies, cream cheese gives a softer cheesecake-like texture like in these Strawberry Cheesecake Cookies. It adds an extra savory note with just a hint of tang.

Peanut Butter: Many recipes for peanut butter cookies recommend that you steer clear of natural peanut butter because of its tendency to separate and create dryer cookies. However, this can easily be avoided by creating a recipe with the right balance of wet versus dry ingredients like in these Peanut Butter Oreo Cookies.

More Baking Guides

Do you have any 🌟tips or tricks or ingredients that you love to use when making cookies? Or issues or questions that you come across when baking? Let me know in the 📝 comments below. I'd love to hear from you!