Skip to Content

What Does Adding An Extra Egg To Cookies Do

What Does Adding An Extra Egg To Cookies Do

What Does Adding An Extra Egg To Cookies Do

By adding an extra egg to cookies, you may get a chewer cookie. Eggs may add to the better texture, and they also broaden the period of usability. More eggs mean that your cookie may have more moisture. The white of an egg may give strength and steadiness to the cookies.

In this short tutorial, we will be answering What does adding extra eggs do to cookies? through a thorough breakdown of what happens to a cookies taste or texture. Now that you have a good idea of what each part of the egg may add to your baking recipe, you can start to see what eggs play in cookies, and what adding too few or too many may do to your recipe.

In my opinion, knowing what eggs do in baking gives you a strong foundation for creating your own recipes, once you choose the proper flour. Either way, knowing what eggs do in baking helps you to be a master recipe manipulator. While most things do not rely on eggs to build their structure, eggs are especially crucial in making cakes and pastries using lighter flours, such as cake flour or cake batter.

While you do not need to use eggs to shorten, they can be extremely helpful when making baked goods that are lighter in solid fats, such as butter. Generally, if the recipe calls for using butter at room temperature or at melting point, then using eggs at room temperature is also a good practice. Generally, when recipes call for melted butter or whipped eggs, the yolks yield more chewy cookies, whereas the whites yield more cake-like cookies.

CookiesEgg yolk to egg white ratio
Soft Cookies The ratio of two egg yolks to one white
Hard cookiesUsing egg yolks alone, with no egg white
Lighter and chewy cookies Adding more egg yolk
How changing the yolk-white ratio might affect dough

Using egg yolks alone, with no egg whites, leaves you with hard cookies. When you add additional eggs, or when the recipe does not have enough eggs, the cookies will turn out noticeably different. Too few egg yolks will make the cookie dough harder to spread, and a lack of moisture in the yolks will also result in the cookies having a dry texture than they would have had you included the egg whites.

By the way, if you’re interested in reading Difference Between Buffalo Sauce And Hot Sauce, then go to my other article.

If you do not, adding one more egg yolk to the dough will make all the difference in making a great-tasting cookie. More often than not, you are going to work with whole eggs for cookies, though there might be a select few recipes that call for just the whites, or just the yolks. With all this in mind, you can get into the kitchen and experiment by adding different amounts of both yolks and egg whites to make the cookies of your dreams.

If you like your cookies to be lighter and chewy, not dense or crunchy, adding egg yolks to your dough is sure to deliver. If you prefer cookies that are chewy, almost cake-like, you will want to up the amount of eggs that you include in the recipe. If your cookies end up flat on top, with a cake-like texture, then you added too many eggs. On the rare occasion you do put extra eggs, you get chewier cookies.

The yolks will develop a chewier, almost cake-like flavor if you add extra eggs. Eggs also add moisture to cookies that otherwise would be overwhelmingly dense and chewy without eggs(s). It also helps your cookies themselves by moistening them, since this increases the cookies flavour. The eggs are then brushed over top of a pastry dough like cake, or bread, before baking.

As the dough (like pie) is baked, the egg turns brown, giving a nice color to the crust, which is appealing and tempting. Whole eggs contribute to puffiness and spreading in cookies, while they also keep cookies cohesive as they bake. In the cookie recipe, eggs serve as the glue to bind all other ingredients and keep the cookies shape. Your eggs naturally hold together your dough, keeping fats and liquids combined, and they help to make a uniform dough that produces both volume and texture.

watch this video to learn how to make perfect chocolate chip cookies

Over-abundant eggs will produce a cake batter that is incredibly thin, and although it will look beautiful, the texture you get is something that is more akin to baked puddings than pie crust. However, failing to balance eggs with proper softeners such as fat and sugar will result in tough, chewy baked goods. Saving cookies from having too many eggs is not as simple as saving them from having too much or too little flour.

If too many eggs are present, your cookies will not have the same warm, gooey goodness; they will also have dry, hard materials. You still have to use a few eggs, since moisture is a needed ingredient for a cookie dough, but if you want thinner cookies, you want to use as few eggs as you need. If using extra-large eggs, you could probably cut down on the number of eggs needed by one.

If you are running low on eggs during baking, and you discover that you need more, you can add 1/4 cup vegetable oil per egg required. You could try eliminating the whites from each egg, which typically drys out during heating or baking, and swapping out the whites for the additional yolks. Also, egg yolks contain more fat than egg whites, which helps to ensure moist, chewy cookies. Egg yolks, specifically, will emulsify your cookie dough, making the cookies dough thicker and allowing them to be slightly more effective in whipping up than they would be otherwise.

To get a better understanding of eggs role in cookies, and how changing the yolk-white ratio might affect dough, I decided to run a number of controlled experiments.

If you’re interested in reading Is A Pickle Considered A Vegetable, then go to my other article.

After testing a few different amounts of whites and yolks in the cookie dough, baking expert Stella Parks found a perfect ratio. I followed Bon Appetit is recipe for Best Chocolate Chip Cookies, which already has the ratio of two egg yolks to one white in the ingredients listing. Scaling down, I tried the version made with one full egg plus an extra yolk, giving the sugar cookies a light yet chewy texture, and the flavors reminded me of French vanilla ice cream. Like the double-white version, my double-yolk dough spreads out and puffs up just like regular cookies…on the outside, anyway.

The augmentations made the cookies soft, almost flaky, and had an off-kilter flavor, softer than the full-egg cookies, not quite as strong in vanilla as the two-white versions. One of my teammates and I had assumed the white cookies from eggs would be dryer and chewier compared to whole eggs, but as testing showed, there was not any meaningful difference. All the tests experiments–height, pressure, color, and taste–showed no differences between the whole eggs controlled cookies and the variation cookies that had just the egg whites, at 95% confidence. Without the custardy flavors from egg yolks, the white-only cookies tasted more strongly vanilla, a benefit I destroyed in my effort to boost the chewiness provided by the whites with yolk richness.

What happens if I add too much egg to cookies?

The quantity of eggs used directly impacts the texture of baked goods since eggs provide baked goods structure. Desserts made with insufficient eggs will be dense, while those made with many eggs would be rubbery. The presence of protein in eggs provides one reason for this.

How does the amount of eggs affect cookies?

Since there are more eggs, the proteins in the flour and starch will bond together more. As a result, the cookie will have a greater degree of texture, which is frequently chewy. The number of eggs in your recipe should be increased if you desire chewy, almost cake-like cookies.

What happens if you add an extra egg to baking?

According to the website, adding too many eggs will also give your cake a distinctly eggy flavor, which will cause it to taste less like a cake and more like a custard or bread pudding. Fine Cooking clarifies that flour and eggs both function as protein-rich elements in baked goods.

Skip to content