The Chocolate Chip Cookies That Changed the Way I Bake

Sarah Kieffer started banging sheet pans in ninth grade. She was going through “a cookie phase,” trying to find the perfect chocolate chip recipe, and one of them wasn’t working out. While most cookies spread in the oven, this one stayed put.

“It was just this ball of dough that didn’t fall, so I hit the pan in the oven because I was mad,” she told me over the phone. “That helped.” The cookies deflated, thinned out, and spread more.

Lifting the pan, then banging it down, forces cookies to breathe out all their hot air and become less puffy and cakey.

It was an aha moment for Kieffer. She loved how pan-banging set the cookies’ edges, encouraged a gooey center, and, most of all, set off a wave of concentric ripples, like dropping a stone into a puddle. From then on, she “started incorporating it into almost every cookie recipe.”

These days, Kieffer is a cookbook author and award-winning blogger. She can frost a layer cake like nobody’s business and roll cinnamon buns for days. But she’s known for her chocolate chip cookies. You know the ones, right?

Kieffer developed the recipe for months (yes, months) while working on The Vanilla Bean Baking Book, but “did not expect them to take off at all.”

You can guess what happened next. Almost a year after her book was published, Kieffer’s cookies took off. So much so, that The New York Times dubbed them “internet-famous.” The secret to their Instagram-good looks, Julia Moskin reported, is pan-banging.

But is any cookie pan-bangable?

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There are nearly 90 million chocolate chip cookie recipes on the internet. Though it may not be the original (another story, best told in Stella Parks’s book BraveTart, the most iconic is Toll House, from which many recipes are derived. As Dorie Greenspan writes in Baking: from my home to yours, her Best Chocolate Chip Cookies are “Toll House cookies’ kin” with “nips, tucks, tweaks, and variations,” like less baking soda and a reworked white-to-brown sugar ratio.

Kieffer’s recipe, on the other hand, goes beyond nips and tucks. Both Toll House’s and her version start with two sticks (1/2 pound) of unsalted butter. Then this happens:

So, is it just pan-banging that sets these cookies apart? Or do all these other factors come into play?

According to Kieffer, her ingredient list creates “the perfect storm of wrinkles.” Just enough baking soda to puff (which means the banging can deflate), with added water to encourage spreading.

“A lot of people try it on other recipes and it doesn’t work the same,” she told me. “It needs to be a cookie that’s not supposed to be cakey.”

This is something she’s been thinking about a lot, as she works on her upcoming cookbook. Titled 100 Cookies, it will be published by Chronicle Books in fall 2020. And, yes, “There will be a whole chapter with pan-banging recipes.”

The general rule is: Pan-bang crispy-chewy cookies (like chocolate chip), not soft-cakey ones (like pumpkin) or crumbly bar ones (like shortbread). But the reality is: Pan-banging a random crispy-chewy cookie probably won’t yield as many ripples as Kieffer’s recipe, nor will it create that crackly top, crunchy crust, gooey center, and DVD shape.

But why not? I had to find out. So, I made dozens of cookies to get to the bottom of all this.

In each batch, I altered one of the standout variables of Kieffer’s recipe—making it closer to the Toll House version—and compared the results. Here’s what I learned:

Pan-Banging

Original: After 10 minutes of baking, “lift the side of the baking sheet up about 4 inches and gently let it drop down against the oven rack, so the edges of the cookies set and the inside falls back down…After the cookies puff up again in 2 minutes, repeat lifting and dropping the pan. Repeat a few more times to create ridges around the edge of the cookie.”
Experiment: Skip this step.
Takeaway: What happens if you don’t pan-bang the pan-banging cookies? They end up thicker, with a smaller surface area—but, get this, they’re still wrinkly as heck. Which means the other factors below count for a lot when it comes to ripple formation.

Flour

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Original: 2 cups all-purpose
Experiment: 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour.
Takeaway: Just as you’d expect, increasing the flour made the cookies cakier, drier, and thicker. It also made them spread less and form fewer ripples when I banged them. All of which to say, it made them worse.

Eggs

Original: 1 egg.
Experiment: 2 eggs.
Takeaway: Like increasing the flour, increasing the eggs made the cookies cakier in consistency (eggs both leaven and dry out baked goods), and we missed the original’s fudgy middle. This batch spread significantly, even more than the original. The wrinkles were there, but low-key, like someone who is starting to wonder if they’re getting old after all.

Baking Soda

Original: ½ teaspoon.
Experiment: 1 teaspoon.
Takeaway: While these cookies were the ripple-iest of them all, we could taste the baking soda, and it didn’t taste great. Because baking soda neutralizes acidic batters and Kieffer’s recipe is notably low on acidic brown sugar, the Toll House amount was too much from a flavor point-of-view. On the bright side, they were extremely flat, wrinkly, and gooey in the center. This supports the theory that more rising means more falling means more ripples.

Water

Original: 2 tablespoons water.
Experiment: No added water.
Takeaway: Take away the water and you get a stodgier, sturdier cookie. It formed more ripples than expected and spread almost as much as the original (what the what?), though the cracks along the top and edge seemed to say, I’m thirsty! We liked its confident crust.

White-to-brown sugar ratio

Original: 1 ½ cups white sugar, ¼ cup brown sugar.
Experiment: Equal parts white and brown sugar.
Takeaway: These cookies were deeper in color, with a more toffee-y taste. They formed plenty of wrinkles and spread a lot. As Stella Parks explains over at Serious Eats, in recipes that call for baking soda—so, both the original and experiment—acidic brown sugar reacts, producing carbon dioxide, leading to puffier cookies. Neutral white sugar doesn’t react, leading to less puffy cookies. And in recipes that call for butter-and-sugar creaming—again, both of these—brown sugar creates fewer air pockets, yielding cookies that spread more. White sugar creates more air pockets, yielding cookies that spread less. All of this would make you think that Kieffer’s white sugar–heavy cookies would be thinner and spread less, while more brown sugar would be thicker and spread more. But the two were pretty dang similar on both accounts.

Chocolate & Nuts

Original: 6 ounces chopped bittersweet chocolate, no nuts.
Experiment: 12 ounces chopped bittersweet chocolate, plus 1 cup chopped walnuts.
Takeaway: These cookies formed a bumpy, pebbly top, letting you know just how chock-full of mix-ins they were. Unfortunately, these mix-ins got in the way of the ripples, yielding a cookie that looked more everyday and less distinct. They were delicious, though.

Scoop Size

Original: Heaping ⅓ cup.
Experiment: 1 tablespoon.
Takeaway: These cookies were nearly eight times smaller than the original and it showed in more ways than just size. They lacked the wrinkles altogether, as well as the crispy-chewy contrast. The texture, in one word, was tacky. Kieffer’s oversized scoop encourages the cookies to bake unevenly, with the edges melting first and the mounded center holding out. This not only creates ripples, but avoids a one-note texture.

Freezing

Original: Freeze dough scoops on the sheet pan for 15 minutes before baking.
Experiment: Bake directly after scooping.
Takeaway: This batch had significantly fewer, smaller ripples than the original. Why? The same reason as the smaller scoop size (see above). Freezing the cookie dough, even for a short amount of time, encourages uneven baking, and uneven baking fosters ripples.

In many ways, Kieffer’s recipe has become its own sort of Toll House—a cookie that everyone is making right now.

Just like Dorie was inspired by Toll House, I was inspired by Kieffer to put my own nips and tucks on her pan-banging recipe. I tweaked the sugar ratio to lean more on brown, used less water, added more chocolate, sprinkled flaky salt on top, and adjusted the method to take place completely in the stand mixer.

But, just like the original, they’re all about the ripples.