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Which Sugar Is The Best For Making Chocolate Chip Cookies?

Today is all about the sweet stuff!! We used the Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe as our base recipe and adjusted the amount and types of sugar for each variation. Before we dive in to what we learned about sugar, here's a note from Jesse:

A Note From Our Writer:

You're probably familiar with the 50/50 combo of light brown sugar and white sugar for making chocolate chip cookies. (As was I!) But I wanted to see what would happen if we played around with that formula. What would happen if we increased the brown sugar? Or went all in and used 100% brown sugar? Turns out, a lot can change with just a simple swap in the sugar!

— Jesse Szewczyk

What We Learned: Sugar can drastically change the flavor, texture, spread, and color of your cookies — so choose wisely. Brown sugar is slightly acidic, while white sugar has a neutral pH level — so they react with leavening agents differently.

The Biggest Takeaways: When it comes to picking out which sugar you should use to make your chocolate chip cookies, keep these things in mind:

1. The darker the brown sugar, the more flavor your cookie will have: This also means the darker your cookie will turn out, so be careful. Too much dark brown sugar = a cookie that looks burnt.

2. White sugar makes cookies spread a bit more and look super pale, so you need to balance it out with a bit of brown sugar.

3. Brown sugar is acidic, so you should think of it as part of your leavening agent: The acid in the molasses will react with the leavening agent in your recipe, so keep this in mind.

4. Using a combination of sugars instead of just one gives you more control: This way you can achieve your ideal color and flavor. Brown sugar will give you depth, while white sugar will balance it out and help with spreading.

Click here to read more about our sugar experiment!