Baking – How to speed up the preparation time for chocolate chip cookies

bakingcookies

I've been charged with the task of making 100+ chocolate chip cookies every other day. As it stands, it takes me over 10 hours to do this. I was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to cut down the time for this?

My recipe is here and workflow (with time) is like this:

  1. (make) 6x the dough (this takes about 25-30 minutes)
  2. let the dough chill in freezer for about 30 minutes
  3. preheat oven to 325F (this takes ~ 20 minutes, but I let the oven sit at 325 for another 20 minutes)
  4. bring out dough (in parts), measure and compress dough into 56g
    (~2 oz.) balls (this is the time sink)
  5. Once I have 18 balls, I rip them according to the recipe's
    instructions, place 9 on one cookie sheet, and 9 on another.
  6. Bake the cookies for 24 minutes (swap racks and rotate sheets at
    12 minute mark), simultaneously "process" more dough.
  7. Take cookies out, let sheets cool for another 10 minutes, and put
    another batch of 18 in the oven.

Since it's clear that I can't make my cookies bake any faster, I think my bottle neck is the "processing" of the dough. I'm okay with getting cookies that are 56g +/- 3g, anyone have any time-tested suggestions?

Best Answer

Preheat while doing other things. That's not a step that should take any effective time.

Don't measure so obsessively. Unless these need to be immaculate cookies, just accept a little variety. Scoop roughly with a spoon, or just your hands, and form into balls with your hands if necessary. If you desperately want precision, you could use a cookie dough scoop. But 56±3g sounds kind of over the top to me. Given that you said this is the main time sink, I'd suggest loosening up a bit.

Are you filling your cookie sheets fully? Do they fill your oven? Following a recipe's instructions to the letter, baking only 9 per sheet, is obviously the wrong thing to do if your cookies or baking sheets aren't the same sizes as those in the recipe. Note also that if you have many cookies per sheet, you can often fit more by tiling in triangles instead of squares.

And finally, reconsider your recipe. I'm sure this one is great, but keep in mind that most standard chocolate chip cookie recipes bake at 350F or 375F, and times more in the 8-12 minute range. If your recipe gives you exactly the cookies you want, and others don't, then stick with it, but if you're unnecessarily sticking to a recipe, try something else.

Edit: one more thought! Chilling the dough is probably important to your recipe, but you could measure/scoop while it's warmer and easier to work with, then chill in balls, and do the final forming once chilled.

And another, having seen your comment: given that you increased the baking time upon filling up the oven more, and are using insulated pans, you might actually want to increase the temperature to 350-375F and see if you can get back down to the 15-18 minute baking time. They may end up closer to the originally-intended consistency!

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