Examination of the effects of chilling time on the spreading of cookies

Abstract

The process of chilling is extensively utilized across a vast variety of baking recipes. Accordingly, in cookie recipes, the process of chilling cookie dough is practiced to allow for the incorporated fat to chill prior to baking. This results in the chilled fat melting at a slower speed which limits the spreading of the baked cookies since the size of the cookies are able to set prior to the fat melting. Despite the fact that this mechanism is widely understood by bakers, there are limited studies dedicated to analyzing whether varied chilling time results in cookies that exhibit significantly different diameters due to this process of spreading. Therefore, in this study, we offer a scientific investigation into the relationship between the chilling times of cookie dough and the spread of cookies. This study was conducted with the objective of determining whether longer a chilling time of cookie dough would result in the significant decrease of cookie spreading, measured by the cookie’s diameter. Within this experiment, we utilized the same cookie recipe throughout the whole study and increased the chilling time of the cookie dough in 20 minute increments. In total, we baked thirteen batches of cookie dough that ranged from 0 minutes to 240 minutes chilling time. Accordingly, we predicted that the diameters of cookies from dough batches chilled for longer periods of time would exhibit significantly smaller diameters than those chilled for shorter periods of time in the refrigerator. In utilizing a total of 39 cookie diameters, the conducted one-way ANOVA analysis revealed a P-value of less than 0.0001. As this P-value is smaller than the significance level of 0.05, the statistical test enables us to reject the null hypothesis that states that the cookie diameters of cookies chilled for longer and shorter periods of time would not be significantly different. Conclusively, the results from the statistical analysis conducted on the collected cookie diameters suggests that there is a statistically significant difference between the diameters of cookies from dough batches chilled for longer and shorter periods of time. Hence, this study suggests that cookie dough chilled in the refrigerator for longer periods of time would result in less spreading of the cookies. Namely, cookie dough chilled for longer periods of time would result in cookies that exhibit smaller diameters.