How to Bake the Perfect Cookie with Tips From Zoë François

She’s taught us to make artisan-quality bread in five minutes a day and steered us through the pitfalls of baking cakes. Now cookbook author and television host Zoë François, of Zoë Bakes, reaches back into her own history, and that of her family, to give us her most personal book yet, Zoë Bakes Cookies.  

Zoë Bakes Cookies contains 75 foundational recipes for cookies, brownies and bars — all of which will make you wish you had some softened butter on hand. But the real genius of the book lies in the sixty-plus pages preceding the recipe, especially the section titled “Cookie Academy.” In it, François breaks down every step of the cookie-baking process, from gathering your ingredients to shipping cookies to homesick college students, to empower her readers not only to bake successfully, but also to define success on their own terms. 

"The Cookie Academy was my favorite part of the book to write,” says François. She knows that baking can seem intimidating — even stifling — with its emphasis on strictly adhering to the recipe. But it need not be so. “Especially with baking, people feel like there’s no room for inserting themselves into it or making it the way they want it to be,” argues François. 

But “if you just give people [the right] information, they feel emboldened to play with the recipe and not feel so nervous about it.” 

Experiment with ingredient proportions

To illustrate how readers can alter recipes to reflect their own taste, Zoë Bakes Cookies includes the results of François’s experiments with her famous chocolate chip cookies — complete with side-by-side photos that show exactly how cookies change when you increase and decrease each ingredient. “What’s perfect to me may not be perfect to you or to the next person,” says François.  So she set out to give her readers the knowledge, and confidence, to customize not only her recipes, but also cherished family recipes that may contain outdated ingredients (hello, oleo!) or idiosyncratic instructions.

Start with a small batch

François has a crucial tip about customizing recipes: Start with a half batch in case you don’t like the results. Of course, halving recipes is a lot easier if you measure ingredients by weight instead of by volume. And that’s just fine with François. “I’m on a crusade to get everyone to bake with a scale,” she laughs. (Same girl, same.)

Mix like a pro

While you may not have ever thought of it this way, cookie dough is an emulsion, similar to hollandaise or a vinaigrette. So while creaming the butter and sugar may not affect the texture of cookies as much as it does with a cake, it is still important to have a smooth, fully incorporated mixture before adding liquid. To that end, François devotes a surprising amount of real estate to the topic of scraping the mixing bowl. (The takeaway: Do it every time you add something new to the bowl and don’t rely on your stand mixer to do all the work; scrape by hand in between additions.)

Add ingredients slowly

And yes, it does make a difference how you add the eggs. “There is a reason you only add eggs one at a time,” emphasizes François. Introducing liquid slowly into the emulsified butter and sugar helps keep them from separating. But if an excitable sous chef does add all the ingredients at once, as happened to François on a recent TV appearance, don’t panic. “Cookies are forgiving,” she reassures.

Perhaps the most surprising tip from the Cookie Academy is to add zests and extracts when creaming the butter and sugar, not at the end, as most recipes instruct. “When I was in culinary school, [I learned] fat carries flavor,” says François. “And so getting the flavor into the fat as soon as possible just made sense.” Adding these flavorings earlier in the process will increase their intensity in the final product.

Don’t fear meringues 

While they may have a reputation for being finicky, “Meringues are fun, fabulous and should not be feared,” laughs François. She has always been dazzled by how adding nothing more than air to egg whites and sugar creates what she calls “this ethereal, beautiful treat.” François offers many practical tips for meringue success in the book - emphasizing timing and following the steps, such as beating the egg whites until foamy before adding sugar. One insider secret: use superfine sugar, sometimes called caster sugar, because “it absorbs more readily into the egg white and won’t weigh them down,” explains François. The ratio of sugar to egg white is important too, cautions François, who says that her recipe has helped a lot of former meringue-phobes.

As for those myths about not baking meringues on humid days, François is skeptical, noting that she did not have trouble when teaching a meringue class in Alabama in the summer. But if you’re concerned, she recommends Swiss meringue, in which the egg whites and sugar are heated together prior to whipping, because it is more stable “and will whip up in any condition.”

Whether you want to enroll in the Cookie Academy or dive right into the recipes, either is fine with François. Just do it with joy and maybe go out and invest in a kitchen scale. You won’t regret it.