home > article > How to Freeze Cookie Dough in Logs — One Badass Chocolate Chip Cookie

Masher

How to Freeze Cookie Dough in Logs — One Badass Chocolate Chip Cookie

• by Nancy, March 05, 2010

Today we learn how to freeze cookie dough in logs. What’s this about? Click here.

We will be using my recipe for One Badass Chocolate Chip Cookie and if you click the highlighted words, One Badass Chocolate Chip Cookie in this sentence, you’ll see lots of photos of the finished, thick chewy cookies and how to bake them off.

What’s a Badass Cookie? Click here.

I’m going to give instructions for mixing by hand, but you can do this on an electric mixer fitted with a paddle too. The ingredients are listed in the box above.

First, take your chocolate chips, either all semi-sweet or half semi-sweet and half white chocolate mixed together, and place in a bowl. Set it aside.

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl. Whisking works like sifting; it prevents lumps and incorporates a little air for a lighter product. Set it aside too. Remember not to scoop, then shake the measuring cup when you measure dry ingredients. Lift the flour into the cup with your free hand, then level off the flour with a knife or your finger. If you scoop flour and shake the cup, you will measure more flour than you need and the cookies may be heavier than they should be.

Add both sugars to the butter and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs, one at a time, only adding the next egg when the previous one is fully incorporated. Add the yolks one at a time, and incorporate each one fully before adding the next. Add the vanilla extract. Mix well.

Pastry chefs often refer to wet ingredients as “the wets” and dry ingredients as “the dries” for short. Sugar, like here, when added to wet ingredients becomes wet and is often included therefore in the term “wets.”

So now you know the lingo: add the dries (your flour mixture) to the wets (butter mixture) all at once and mix gently until just incorporated. If you are using an electric mixer, add the dries on lowest speed and mix only until just incorporated. Do not over beat or the cookies will be tough. Best bet is to stop mixing in the dries when there is maybe a little flour still to be mixed in so that when you add the chocolate chips, you do not over-mix the dough.

Add the chocolate chips and very gently fold them in with a spatula. Again, do not over mix. At this point, if you want to bake off a cookie or two (or three or four) just take ice cream scoop size balls and gently flatten them into disks on a parchment-paper lined, greased or nonstick cookie pan and bake at 350 degrees F. until golden, about 8 minutes or more. Cool on a rack. The rest we will freeze.

If you have used melted butter instead of softened butter to make your dough, you may have to refrigerate the dough briefly to get it to a consistency for forming logs easily. This is done quickest by spreading the dough on a sheetpan first, then refrigerating it. Check it every fifteen minutes until it is pliable but not sticky and too soft.

Now we will make the logs. Pull out a long length of plastic wrap over your work surface. Alternatively you can use parchment paper if you don’t want to use plastic. Parchment will require some finesse however to get the logs smooth.

Place a dollop of dough onto the plastic wrap, and then another and another.

It will look like this. From this doubled recipe, I always end up with two logs like this so don’t worry if you still have lots of dough left in your bowl.

Pull the near edge of the plastic wrap or parchment over the log until you can wrap up the log completely in the wrap.

The wrapped dollops of dough will look like this.

With both hands on the log, pull the log gently from the center out until it is even and smooth.

That’s it! You can now freeze the log. Repeat the procedure to use up the dough in your bowl. Most likely you will end up with two logs. For the full recipe plus instructions on how to bake it off, click here.

Next Saturday we will make and freeze the dough for One Badass Ginger Molasses Cookies. If you’d like to join me, have these ingredients ready for next week:

3 cups unsalted, sweet butter (1 1/2 pounds, or 6 sticks)
4 cups white sugar
1 cup molasses (for cookies with a more bitter taste, use robust unsulphured blackstrap molasses, for cookies with a lighter taste, use unsulphured light, cooking, or fancy molasses)
4 eggs
8 cups all purpose unbleached white flour
2 T. plus 2 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
4 t. cinnamon
1 1/2 t. ground cloves (this may be increased up to double the amount if you are a clove lover)
4 t. ground ginger
1/4 cup crystallized ginger (available at most supermarkets that carry dried and candied fruit)
Turbinado sugar, or any large crystal sugar for baking

See you then!

see also: How to Freeze Cookie Dough in Logs

Tell a friend about this article: