Pinned over 3 million times, these super soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies are the most popular cookie recipe on my website. Melted butter, more brown sugar than white sugar, and an extra egg yolk guarantee the chewiest chocolate chip cookie texture. Big chocolate chunks promise chocolate in every single bite. The flavor and texture of these cookies is unparalleled by any other recipe. No mixer required!
There are hundreds of chocolate chip cookies recipes out there. Everyone has their favorite! But, in my mind, this recipe really stands out. These chewy chocolate chip cookies are:
- The chewiest of chewy and the softest of soft!
- Extra thick.
- Bakery style with an under-baked center.
- Exploding with chocolate!
Warning: these chocolate chip cookies require a tall glass of milk. Watch me make them from start to finish in my own kitchen:
I tested today’s cookie recipe over and over again to make sure they’re absolutely perfect before sharing the recipe. I still have a big space in my heart (and tastebuds) for my Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies. They’re one of the most popular recipes on my website! Today’s recipe is similar, but I increased the chewy factor.
How to Make Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
The cookie dough is made from standard ingredients: flour, leavener, salt, sugar, butter, egg, & vanilla. It’s the ratios of those ingredients that make this recipe stand out from the rest. Mix 2 and 1/4 cups of flour with 1 teaspoon of baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and my favorite: cornstarch. I use 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of cornstarch in this recipe.
- Why cornstarch? Cornstarch gives the cookies that ultra soft consistency we all know and love. Plus, it helps keep the cookies beautifully thick.
Use melted butter in this chocolate chip cookie recipe. Most of the cookies on my website call for creaming softened butter with the sugars. Chewy chocolate chip cookies require melted butter.
- Why melted butter? Melted butter produces the chewiest cookies. It can, however, make your baked cookie greasy, so I made sure there is enough flour to avoid that from happening.
Since you are using melted butter, you don’t need a mixer for this cookie recipe.
Use More Brown Sugar
Use a mix of brown sugar and white granulated sugar in your chocolate chip cookies. I prefer more brown sugar than white granulated sugar because the moisture in brown sugar promises an extra soft and chewy baked cookie. White granulated sugar is still necessary though. It’s dry and helps the cookies spread. A little bit of spread is a good thing.
Too much cookie spreading? Here are my 10 Guaranteed Tips to Prevent Over-Spreading
Extra Egg Yolk
Another way to promise a super chewy chocolate chip cookie is to use an extra egg yolk. The extra egg yolk adds richness, soft tenderness, and binds the dough. You will need 1 egg and 1 egg yolk. You can freeze the extra egg white in a ziplock bag for up to 1 month or use it to make my Skinny Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes. 🙂
The dough will be soft and the chocolate chunks may not stick because of the melted butter. Just keep stirring it; I promise it will come together.
The most important step is next.
Chill the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
Chilling the cookie dough is so important! Unless you want the cookies to spread into a massive cookie puddle, chilling the dough is mandatory for this cookie recipe. It allows the ingredients to settle together after the mixing stage but most importantly: cold dough results in thicker cookies. Cover the cookie dough and chill the dough for at least 2-3 hours and even up to 3-4 days. After chilling, let your cookie dough sit at room temperature for 10 minutes before rolling into balls.
After chilling, sometimes I roll the cookie dough into balls and freeze them in a large zipped-top bag. Then I bake them straight from the freezer, keeping them in the oven for an extra minute. This way you can have just one of two cookies whenever you want!
These cookies are huge–about 3 Tablespoons of dough is rolled to make one cookie. The batch only makes about 16 cookies since you will be rolling them so large. Feel free to make the cookies smaller (about 2 Tablespoons of dough per cookie) instead. If you do that, be sure to reduce the baking time by a couple minutes.
When you remove the cookie dough from the refrigerator after chilling, the dough will be slightly crumbly. The warmth of your hands rolling it will make it stay intact. Roll the cookie dough balls taller, rather than wide as I discussed and showed in my cake batter chocolate chip cookies recipe. This little tried-and-true trick will result in thicker cookies. I do it for every single cookie I bake.
Secrets to Thick, Soft, & Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Underbaked cookies are the secret to softness.
- Using cornstarch in the dough is another secret to softness, as well as the secret to thickness.
- Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie.
- Adding an extra egg yolk increases chewiness.
- Rolling the cookie dough balls to be taller than wider increases thickness.
- Using melted butter (and slightly more flour) increases chewiness.
- Chilling the dough results in a thicker cookie.
Bonus: try them with half M&Ms and half chocolate chunks!
Print
Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Cook Time: 12 minutes
- Total Time: 3 hours, 22 minutes
- Yield: 16 large cookies
- Category: Dessert
- Method: Baking
- Cuisine: American
Description
Pinned over 3 million times, these super soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies are the most popular cookie recipe on my website. Melted butter, 1 extra egg yolk, and more brown sugar than white sugar guarantee the chewiest chocolate chip cookie texture. Chilling the cookie dough is imperative. No mixer required!
Ingredients
- 2 and 1/4 cups (280g) all-purpose flour (spoon & leveled)
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch*
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cup (1.5 sticks or 170g) unsalted butter, melted & slightly cooled*
- 3/4 cup (150g) packed light or dark brown sugar
- 1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar
- 1 large egg + 1 egg yolk, at room temperature
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 1 and 1/4 cups (225g) semi-sweet chocolate chips or chocolate chunks
Instructions
- Whisk the flour, baking soda, cornstarch, and salt together in a large bowl. Set aside.
- In a medium bowl, whisk the melted butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar together until no brown sugar lumps remain. Whisk in the egg, then the egg yolk. Finally, whisk in the vanilla extract. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix together with a large spoon or rubber spatula. The dough will be very soft, yet thick. Fold in the chocolate chunks. They may not stick to the dough because of the melted butter, but do your best to combine them. Cover the dough and chill in the refrigerator for 2-3 hours or up to 3-4 days. Chilling is mandatory. I highly recommend chilling the cookie dough overnight for less spreading.
- Take the dough out of the refrigerator and allow to slightly soften at room temperature for 10 minutes.
- Preheat oven to 325°F (163°C). Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats. (Always recommended for cookies.) Set aside.
- Roll the dough into balls, about 3 Tablespoons of dough each. The dough will be crumbly, but the warmth of your hands will help the balls stay together. Roll the cookie dough balls to be taller rather than wide, to ensure the cookies will bake up to be thick. See this post for more detail and a photo. Place 8 balls of dough onto each cookie sheet. Press a few more chocolate chips/chunks on top of the dough balls for looks, if desired.
- Bake the cookies for 12-13 minutes. The cookies will look very soft and underbaked. They will continue to bake on the cookie sheet. Allow to cool on the cookie sheet for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
- Cookies stay fresh covered at room temperature for up to 1 week.
Notes
- Make Ahead & Freezing Instructions: You can make the cookie dough and chill it in the refrigerator for up to 2-3 days. Allow to come to room temperature then continue with step 4. Baked cookies freeze well for up to 3 months. Unbaked cookie dough balls freeze well for up to 3 months. Bake frozen cookie dough balls for an extra minute, no need to thaw. Click here for my tips and tricks on freezing cookie dough.
- Cornstarch: If you don’t have cornstarch or don’t want to use it, simply leave it out. The cookies are still very soft.
- Butter: Salted butter can be used instead. Reduce salt in the cookie dough to 1/4 teaspoon.
- Room temperature egg + egg yolk are best. Typically, if a recipe calls for room temperature or melted butter, it’s in good practice to use room temperature eggs as well. To bring eggs to room temperature quickly, simply place the whole eggs into a glass of warm water for 5 minutes. What to do with the extra egg white? Make these or these.
- Be sure to check out my top 5 cookie baking tips AND these are my 10 must-have cookie baking tools.
Keywords: cookies, chocolate chip cookies
Make a Giant Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake next time.
See more cookie recipes.
I’ve been looking for a great chewy chocolate chip recipe and I’ve finally found it!! Normally cookies are too cakey or crispy, but these cookies are the perfect CHEWY texture and taste bakery made! Thank you for this recipe!
★★★★★
Love this recipe! I’ve made it probably 20 times! I get compliments on it anywhere I take them. I have found if you mix the chocolate chips into the wet ingredient before adding to the dry, it is MUCH easier to mix everything. Also rolling out the balls BEFORE you put in the fridge makes that part much easier too and doesn’t seem to effect the baking.
★★★★★
They are really soft and chewy cookies but way too sweet. Next time I’m going to half the amount of sugar and see if they turn out better. I used dark chocolate chips and I’m glad because the bitterness of the dark chocolate helped offset the excessive sweetness.
They’re really good cold too, we keep our cookies in the fridge and these are still super soft and chewy.
★★★★
Hi Sally,
I wasnt able to find cornstarch instead have cornflour? Is that doable!?
They’re the same thing 🙂
I made these cookies today and they where absolutely delicious. They are soft and chewy and fluffy. For some reason I have a hard time making chocolate chip cookies chewy and fluffy, but with your step by step I was able to make awesome cookies!! Thank you so much for sharing your recipe. I greatly appreciated it!!
★★★★★
Delicious! I think I took them out of the oven a little early at 13 minutes though, as they weren’t quite done in the middle. I’m gonna try leaving them in a minute longer to see if that helps, as they were so close to perfection (and I only cooked half the batch).
★★★★★
These are the best cookies I’ve ever had in my life
★★★★★
Finally a recipe for perfect cookies. Thanks for the great instructions!!
★★★★★
Hi Sally, I decided to make the cookies smaller than 3 tablespoons in size & I definitely felt I needed to bake them for longer than 12-13 minutes. Is that possible?
followed this recipe exactly except I used whole wheat flour instead of all purpose, turned out amazing! Love the tall cookie technique too, it helped them stay super thick
★★★★★
Tried this recipe and it was really chewy. Perfect the way I want it
★★★★★
I decided to make these cookies, but forgot to look at the amounts needed for the chocolate chunks, so ended up buying only 100g of dark chocolate chunks. They still turned out very well (although mysterious first batch was a bit too thick, so I made them smaller for the second batch). Considering this is the first time I’ve ever baked anything, it was a huge success. Thanks for the awesome recipe and also for adding the amount of ingredients in grams, since some of us don’t own cup measures and don’t know how big they are!
★★★★★
Hi Sally.
These did not taste good to me at all. I made these a few days ago I replaced the baking soda with baking powder so I would not taste the baking soda. I do not think that was it. I think it had too much cornstarch in it. I read your not about the cornstarch after I added it and whisked it in. I still cannot mail these to my friend at this point. I do not know what went wrong.
If I make these again I will be leaving the cornstarch out completely like your note says. They were soft though like they were supposed to be, but they just did not taste good. I do love you chewy oatmeal pumpkin chocolate chip cookies though.
Please let me know by e-mailing me at
[email protected]
Definitely was the baking powder switch – you can’t taste baking soda. I think you should stick to the recipe. These are great cookies.
How many calories in the full batch of cookies?
I followed the recipe perfectly. Even did the tall cookie dough placement. I did that with a test batch. The dough towers fell and I pretty much had under baked cookie logs. Even after letting them set for an additional 10 minutes on the cookie sheet they were still under baked. I’m not sure if “chewy” means under baked, but if it does then I guess I did it right. I could see these cookies being absolutely delicious if they were baked at the right temperature & time.
★★★
Thanks so much for trying the cookies and I appreciate the feedback! Feel free to bake the cookies longer. Luckily under-baked cookies are an easy fix!
Awesome recipe! Best chewy chocolate chip cookies. Followed the recipe. No problems. I’ve never made cookies this large. I was scared at first putting them on the cookie sheet, but they turned out perfect.
★★★★★
Thanks for sharing this recipe, made them today, after chilling the dough overnight, and they were perfect. Have tried a lot of recipes, and I think the trick may have been chilling overnight. Whole family loved them,
My biggest issue was the kids ate them too quick.
★★★★★
I’m thrilled they were such a hit, Ben!
You use the term “whisk”. Is butter mixture actually creamed with a blender? I’ve never heard of whisking to cream
Hi Laura, We are using melted butter here – so no creaming necessary! The melted butter and other ingredients come together easily with a hand held whisk.
Thank you for clarifying! ( get it…clarifying…talking bout butter)
Delicious taste. Sadly, these cookies were way underbaked, sunken in, and thin. Even trying to leave them in the oven for a prolonged time did not suffice. Followed the exact recipe. Major bummer. 🙁
However, the upside is, the remaining cookie dough performed MUCH better for me when I changed oven temperature to 350F. So for those struggling with an overly underbaked outcome, it may be the oven temp.
★★
I absolutely LOVE these chocolate chip cookies. I’ve made them several times the past couple months since I found the recipe and the cookies turn out perfect every time. I bake for 1 extra minute.
★★★★★
Follow the recipe exactly and the product was perfect. Popped the cookies in the freezer while the oven was coming to heat for better height.
★★★★★
Made these tonight ! Pretty good!!!!
★★★★
Cooked these and kept in the fridge for best part of 2 days. Just baked them , absolutely gorgeous! Will definitely be making again thanks Sally
★★★★★
These brownies were SO GOOD! Thank you so much!
★★★★★
I’m giving this cookie 5 stars it was so freaking yummy!
The tall method definitely helped when baking.
Chilling the dough is a definite!
But it was worth the wait❤
★★★★★
Best recipe ever! I Left mine in a little bit longer be because I wanted mines a little more cooked. Loved the details in the video.
★★★★★
These cookies were not a hit with my family. I made them according to recipe, and baked the first batch at the time state in the recipe. They were way too underdone, even after sitting on the baking sheet for over 10 min. They were falling apart in our hands, and didn’t have a chewy texture, more like cookie dough texture. It wasn’t an appealing texture. I baked the next batch for about 7 minutes longer, and they came out with a much better texture, still chewy, so that was good. Unfortunately the flavor was just meh for chocolate chip cookies. They were missing the deeper flavor of more brown sugar and tasted more like bland sugar cookies to us, despite using the stated amounts of both sugars. This wasn’t the recipe for us, but I still love Sally’s Baking Addiction. It’s usually my first and only stop for new recipes.
★★★
My son and I made these cookies! Great recipe. Exactly as pictured. Thank you!
★★★★★
Made these for Easter and replaced chocolate chips with broken up malted milk eggs. Very yummy!
★★★★★
I’ve made these a couple of times, they’re fabulous! But every time, my dough isn’t sticking together smoothly like yours in your video. My butter is melted & cooled but maybe room temp is too cool? It’s like there isn’t enough moisture in the batter. Any ideas or suggestions? I’m putting in all the right amount of ingredients & following the instructions exactly as they’re written.
Can you use margarine or baking spread instead? Run out of butter during lockdown but have 2kg marg!
I love how easy these are and the dough freezes brilliantly
★★★★★