This is why your cookies are coming out greasy (2023)

FAQs

This is why your cookies are coming out greasy? ›

If you've had this happen to you, odds are you made one of two mistakes: either you didn't allow the ingredients to thoroughly mix during the creaming process or you didn't allow the dough to rest enough before baking.

If you use too much butter, the cookies will end up flat and greasy. And if you use too little flour, the amount of butter and sugar will be proportionally too high, meaning the cookies will spread for the aforementioned reasons.

This type of situation will often cause your cookies to come out not only greasy but also flat. To fix cookies with too much butter or oil, try one of these options: Add in extra flour. Put the batter in the refrigerator for a few hours before baking.

Adding too much butter can cause the cookies to be flat and greasy. Adding too little butter can cause the cookies to be tough and crumbly. You should use unsalted butter to control the salt content, but if you only have salted on hand, reduce the amount of added salt accordingly.

Scoop It Out With Ladle:

Many times, you see a thick layer of oil floating on the top. Take a ladle and press it against the dish so that oil is squeezed out and is fills up the ladle. Now simply, discard the oil and enjoy your dish without much guilt.

Greasy cakes are normally just the product of too much butter or fat being used to coat the cake tin. When the mixture is in the lined tin in the oven, the fat fries the sponge so cakes can often come out crispy around the edges or a little greasy on top.

Too Much Egg Was Used

Too much egg is a likely culprit for sticky dough. Many cookie recipes call for one large egg or two large eggs. If you're using homegrown eggs from your hens or a neighbor's, you could be using too much egg for your recipe. Weigh you egg on a kitchen scale if you're not sure how large it is.

Warm cookie dough or excess butter will cause the cookies to spread too much, baking quickly on the outside but remaining raw in the middle. Next time, chill your cookies in the fridge for 10 minutes before you bake them. If the problem persists, use less butter.

Q: HOW LONG SHOULD I CHILL THE DOUGH? Anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. The longer you chill the dough, the more flavor will develop. The flour will also absorb more of the moisture so the thicker and chewier the final texture will be.

Is melted or softened butter better for cookies? ›

In cookies, softened butter will result in a cakier and airier cookie than using melted butter. This is due to the fact that softened butter will create air bubbles that expand in the oven during baking. Melted butter will make your cookies delightfully dense on the inside and crisp on the edges.

When baking soda, also called sodium bicarbonate, is combined with an acid (like buttermilk or lemon juice) and a liquid, it produces the carbon dioxide that helps the dough or batter rise.

Creaming butter and sugar together adds pockets of air that aerate the batter. This air puffs up cakes and other homemade treats as they bake, giving them a lighter and more appealing texture. The air is added by beating room-temperature butter with sugar on high speed.

Trade half the butter with pureed fruit such as mashed bananas, apple butter or prunes (prunes work best with chocolate recipes). Replace half the oil with applesauce. Replace each whole egg with two egg whites or 1/4 cup egg substitute. Replace cream with equal parts of evaporated skim milk.

Cleaning expert Leslie Reichert says the real solution to removing oily stains is rubbing alcohol. Apply it to the stain using a light, dabbing motion until the area is wet. Allow the alcohol a few minutes to break down the oil, then rub the area with a simple bar soap, like Ivory.

Most people have the best luck with WD-40, spraying it into a bowl and applying with cotton swabs, being careful to not let the oil stain through to the back of the clothing item. Then, soak up the stain using a few repeated brushings/scrubbings of baking soda, treat with dishwashing liquid, and wash and dry and usual.

Greasy foods are often fried, which means that they're cooked in a lot of oil. Methods that don't use as much oil include: Oven frying. This involves baking at a very high temperature (450°F or 232°C), which allows foods to get crispy using little or no oil.

Greasy bottomed cupcakes are caused by the cupcake liners absorbing too much fat from your cake batter. This may happen because of your baking technique, or because of a recipe that contains too much fat. To prevent greasy cases, pop a small amount of uncooked rice under the case before adding the cupcake batter.

Cookie temperatures fluctuate, with some recipes as low as 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and a few as high as 425 degrees Fahrenheit, but most recipes land on 375 or 350 to evenly bake the entirety of the cookie.

Chilling cookie dough controls spread.

Chilling cookie dough before baking solidifies the fat in the cookies. As the cookies bake, the fat in the chilled cookie dough takes longer to melt than room-temperature fat. And the longer the fat remains solid, the less cookies spread.

How do you keep cookies soft and chewy after baking? ›

Putting a slice of fresh white bread in the container with the cookies will help the cookies stay soft: fresh bread is moist, and that slice will give up its moisture for the greater good: keeping the cookies from drying out. We recommend white bread so that no flavor is transferred to the cookies.

Undermixed butter and sugar will look gritty and chunky. This can lead to dense cookies and cakes. It is possible to overmix the butter and sugar. If you overmix, however, the butter will separate out of the mixture and it will be grainy and soupy, so be sure to stop once your butter becomes light and fluffy.

For baking purposes, the Test Kitchen recommends using unsalted butter so you can better control the amount of salt that goes into the recipe. Salted butter is best for serving at the table with bread or to flavor a dish, like mashed potatoes.

Overworking the butter will eventually beat the air out, making your dough both dense and warm. It's a recipe for disaster, so keep an eye on the clock.

The amount of flour used should be about two times the amount of fat. To determine how much flour to use, start with equal amounts of flour and fat and then increase the amount of flour until the dough is slightly tacky. It is better to have too little than too much.

#1: All-purpose flour

This protein range is ideal for giving cookies a soft but chewy texture. Using a lower protein flour like cake flour (around 7-9% protein) to make cookies will make them more fluffy and “cake-like” compared to using all-purpose flour.

If your cookies come out too thin and crisp, it may be because there was too much sugar, especially white sugar, in the dough. A higher ratio of white sugar makes crisper cookies, whereas a higher ratio of brown sugar makes chewier cookies. Another possible cause is the temperature of the butter or batter.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.

Chilling the dough creates fluffier cookies with better consistency. Epperson said that, like many foods, cookie dough benefits from resting (in the refrigerator) to let the flavors infuse and basically marinate together. So not only will the cookie's consistency be more even, but the actual taste will be better, too!

As a general rule of thumb, you should refrigerate cookie dough for at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours. More than that, and you won't see a noticeable difference in the final product.

What happens if you use cold butter in cookies? ›

Your Butter Came Straight From the Fridge

This relates to the issue of creaming, because cold butter is more difficult to cream. Thus, if your butter is too cold, your cookies will be denser, and they will likely not spread enough in the pan when you bake them. In general, you want your butter to be cool, but not cold.

Most cookie recipes call for beating room-temperature butter. At a temperature between 70 and 72 degrees F, butter is soft enough to incorporate air, but not so soft that it will melt immediately in the oven and result in super-thin cookies.

To create cookies, you typically use whole eggs and their proteins for flavor, leavening, structure, and color. Eggs promote puffiness and spreading in cookies, while also holding the cookie together during baking.

Granulated sugar

Using granulated white sugar will result in a flatter, crispier and lighter-colored cookie. Granulated sugar is hygroscopic, so it attracts and absorbs the liquid in the dough. This slows down the development of the gluten (flour), which makes the cookies crispier.

What Happens to Cookies without Baking Soda? If you have a recipe that asks for baking soda and you leave it out completely, your cookies will likely be extremely dense as there was no chemical reaction to introduce those gas bubbles and give it rise.

As Joy of Baking explains, a surplus of baking powder will turn your treat's flavor bitter. And that's not even the worst part. Adding in too much baking powder could cause your dessert to rise too fast and fall apart.

Usually it takes anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes of beating eggs and sugar using an electric mixer to reach ribbon stage. But don't rely on time. Instead, use some key visual clues to recognize when you've succeeded: Texture: The mixture should have thickened significantly, becoming almost foam-like.

Starting with 65°F butter, mix until the butter and sugar have increased in volume by about half. The mix should be lighter in color, and you should no longer see the sugar crystals. Using a stand mixer will take just about 5 minutes.

Using a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, or a hand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar for your cookie dough until they are light and fluffy. This should take about 5 minutes on a medium/high speed.

You can absolutely substitute butter for the vegetable oil. Use the same quantity specified in the directions (for example, if it calls for 1/3 cup of oil, use 5 1/3 tablespoons of butter). Melt it down, then let it cool a bit. You might not ever go back to oil!

How do you reduce oil content? ›

The answer is NO. The fat content can never be replaced with water or milk. Oil is the most crucial ingredient in a cake that makes it soft, moist and spongy. You can substitute oil with butter or any other low-fat oil, not with water or water-like liquid.

Baking soda is an alkali, which means it does a great job of dissolving grease. And because it's mild, it destroys grease without destroying the surface you're cleaning. Just mix 3 tablespoons of baking soda with 1 cup of water.

Mix 1 cup vinegar with 3 cups of water, 1 cup of baking soda and ½ cup of dish soap in a bowl. This solution is best used right from the bowl, so dip a clean cloth into the bowl to apply the degreaser, then use the cloth to scrub the greasy surface. Be sure to rinse afterward and wipe the surface again to finish.

Alcohol is the best solvent to dissolve grease. For instance, isopropyl alcohol will quickly break down grease and grime in your home.

Vinegar just doesn't work on removing grease from surfaces because it is an acid. Use an alkaline soap, such as dish soap, for oil spills and messes.

Use Absorbent Paper Towels:

When it's impossible to curb the craving to bite into a crunchy, deep-fried snack, you can place the food on an absorbent paper right after pulling it out from the oil after frying. The paper absorbs oil which has not yet seeped into the food and is still present on the surface.

STEP 4: Make a solution of water and vinegar, spray the affected area, and let it soak for 30 minutes to 1 hour. Vinegar is an ally and a time-saver when it comes to removing oil from clothes, thanks to its acetic acid that cuts through grease. Vinegar also helps deodorize and remove the smell that can linger from oil.

On your computer, open Chrome. Clear browsing data. At the top, choose a time range. To delete everything, select All time.

The easiest way to fix sticky cookie dough is to chill it for 30-60 minutes. This firms up the butter and allows the flour to absorb more moisture, making the dough less sticky and easier to handle. If the dough is still sticky after chilling, you can gently mix in a light dusting of flour until it improves.

Should I clear cookies every day? ›

So how often should you clean these cookies? If you're using a public computer, you should delete them and other data, such as browsing history, right after your session. If it's your personal device, it's a good idea to remove all cookies at least once a month to keep your device neat.

As a general rule, you should clear your browser cache and cookies at least once a month, or more often if you experience any of the following: slow running or crashing browsers, difficulty loading websites or features, outdated or incorrect information or images on some websites, the need to free up storage space on ...

Another method: add flour. You don't want too much—start mixing with one tablespoon and slowly increase from there. This will help your ingredients adhere to one another. While it may not be as firm as you'd like, it'll work well enough to bake.