The Butter Mistake That's Leaving You With Lackluster Cookies

There are few things more delicious than digging into a plate of freshly made cookies. The hot cookies — be they chocolate chip (like the ones at Costco), peanut butter, or sugar cookies — taste great, evoke feelings of nostalgia, and just make you feel good. But if you love baking and you keep noticing your cookies aren't turning out perfectly, the answer to your problems could have something to do with your butter.

The key to baking — aside from following instructions — is patience, and using butter with cookies does requires patience. Butter is a key ingredient in any cookie recipe, but there's a big difference between using cold butter, melted butter, or softened butter in terms of what they do to the cookies. Knowing the difference can make a big difference between perfect cookies and lackluster treats.

Cold butter is frequently used in baking for items like pie crusts, but care must be taken when using it. When it's pulled from the fridge and added to a baking mix, it can result in thick, flaky, almost biscuit-like cookies. That's not necessarily the case with melted butter. Since it's melted, it mixes well with sugar and flour to create thin, crispy cookies as melted butter tends to spread more.

To get Instagram-worthy cookies (either traditional or a fun new cookie hybrid), using softened butter at room temperature remains your best bet. For reference, room temperature butter is between 70 and 72 degrees — not soft enough yet to melt, but soft enough to take in air. What you end up with are cookies that have the mouthfeel of cakes rather than crispy cookies.

For a peek behind the curtain, room-temperature butter doesn't automatically melt in the oven, which helps prevent gluten development. Because softened butter can hold air, you get cookie batter that's perfectly textured and gives you the kind of chewy treats you'll be dying to share with family and friends.

Butter can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour to reach room temperature — but that patience can go a long way. While each form of butter (cold, melted, and room temperature) has its own effect on cookies, using room-temperature butter can save you a lot of frustration, easily eliminate a mistake in your baking process, and give you more time to enjoy baking delicious treats.