FOOD NEWS
The Simple Baking Tip To Prevent A Burnt Batch Of Cookies
By Kalea Martin
If you're baking a new cookie recipe for the first time, it can be hard to determine when you should remove them from the oven without underbaking or burning them.
You may think the best way to go about it is to constantly check in on them by opening the oven door, but this reduces the temperature and prevents them from baking properly.
A more effective method is to do a trial run with a single cookie. Add one scoop of dough to the tray, bake it according to your best judgment, and determine the outcome.
You can easily figure out how long you should be baking the rest of the batch. Even if it ends up burning, you'll only be ruining one cookie and not the entire tray.
Doing a test run is usually a reliable indicator, but make sure your cookie dough is at the same temperature as your trial cookie when it goes into the oven and use the same pan.
Along with oven temperature and cooking time, too much butter and not enough flour causes the cookies to spread, leading to burnt edges; excessive sugar results in burnt bottoms.
The level of brownness on the edges or bottom of a test cookie indicates recipe modification — relatively even brownness means you need to adjust the temperature or baking time.