Baking chocolate chip cookies is hard. They either come out too flat or too lumpy, too dry or too doughy, too big or too small; the list goes on. Baking the “perfect” chocolate chip cookie is often a game of luck. It happens maybe once in a great, long while. But what if I told you that you don’t need luck to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie? Here are four easy tips you can use to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

1. Melt the butter.

Most chocolate chip cookie recipes will call for room temperature or softened butter. Though your cookies will still come out okay if you use softened butter, the dough is often left with chunks of butter, and the cookies develop weird shapes. This is because as the cookies bake, the lumps of butter that remained in the dough will melt and cause little air bubbles to form. If you want to prevent this, melt your butter. Melting the butter allows it to be stirred smoothly into the dough, ridding it of any chunks. Once you bake your cookies, they will keep a perfect shape and be free of air bubbles.

Tip: When melting butter, it works best if you cut it into small pieces before placing it into a pot over the stove or a microwavable dish. It will melt faster this way and will be less likely to leave small, unmelted chunks.

2. Use more brown sugar than white sugar.

Almost all recipes will call for a mixture of white sugar and brown sugar, but they usually call for an equal amount of each. If you like your cookie crunchy, then stick to using an equal amount. If you like a nice soft, chewy chocolate chip cookie, however, always use more brown sugar. Brown sugar makes for a softer cookie, because it adds moisture to the dough that white sugar does not. This is due to the fact that the brown sugar becomes brown by adding molasses to white sugar. Therefore, the molasses is the cause of the moisture, and the moisture is the cause of the soft, chewy cookies that so many people love. 

3. Add cornstarch (or a substitute) to your dry ingredients.

It’s not common to see cornstarch listed with the dry ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie recipe, but it actually serves multiple purposes in baking a perfect cookie. First of all, it aids in thickening the cookie while it bakes. If you use cornstarch, you can be almost certain that you will end up with perfectly thick cookies, because cornstarch is a thickening agent. However, it also helps create chewiness. It helps hold all of the ingredients in the dough together making it so that they don’t develop a strange consistency. Because of this, the cookies come out perfectly chewy and well-shaped.

Tip: If you don’t have cornstarch, you can use arrow root, rice flour, or potato starch as a substitute.

4. Refrigerate the dough.

“Chill the dough for 1-2 hours,” is one of the most annoying steps in a chocolate chip cookie recipe. Nobody wants to wait a whole hour to be able to bake their cookies, they just want to bake the dough and go. However, to many peoples dismay, chilling the dough is one of the most important steps to making perfect chocolate chip cookies. If you don’t place your cookie dough in the refrigerator for at least thirty minutes, it will be too soft. This not only makes scooping the dough a messier, more difficult process, but it also causes the cookies to flatten out in the oven. By refrigerating the dough, you allow the dough to become firm making it less likely to spread out a lot in the oven. Thus, you are left with a thicker, chewier cookie.