Things bakers know: Age your cookie dough

If your kitchen has become a cookie-making factory this time of year, you’re familiar with this step of the recipe: rest the dough in the refrigerator before shaping. That resting step allows a few essential things to happen: It controls spread (especially important for cut-out cookies), flavors meld, and the texture improves.

While many cookie recipes call for a short rest, anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, there are plenty of cookies that benefit from even longer rests — anywhere from days to months (!).

This is especially true in the case of holiday cookies flavored with spices like cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger, anise, and cardamom. In these cases, aging the doughs allows the spices’ intensity to mellow out and flavors to develop over time — a small adjustment that still adds a perceptible difference to the finished cookies. (Think about it like marinating meat for an hour versus overnight.)

Photography and food styling by Liz Neily

In fact, many traditional German and Central European holiday cookies — such as Lebkuchen, Speculaas, and springerle — call for this step. 

“I have a recipe for a traditional German Lebkuchen where the dough is aged for two months,” says Luisa Weiss, author of Classic German Baking. She notes that the dough can technically be baked the day after mixing it, but testing proved that time was the secret ingredient. “When developing the recipe for the book, we baked off cookies the next day after making the dough, two weeks later, and then two months later. And we found that the longer the dough aged, the richer and more complex the cookies tasted,” she adds.  While our Lebkuchen recipe doesn’t specifically call for such a lengthy rest, you can easily age this dough (or any other spiced cookie doughs) in the fridge until you’re ready to bake. 

And this not exclusive to traditional holiday cookies; your chocolate chip cookies will benefit from a lengthy rest of up to three days as well. Oatmeal cookies can also benefit. In her cookbook, A Good Bake, pastry chef Melissa Weller recommends aging the dough for her Oatmeal Raisin Cookies for up to four days. “[T]he oats absorb all the liquid and the finished product develops a more profound flavor,” notes writer Charlotte Druckman in a 2015 Wall Street Journal article.  

That means you can get started on your cookies as early as you’d like, then bake them off when you’re ready. So don’t rush it; time is flavor.

Cover photo (Spiced Star Cookies) by Rick Holbrook; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne.