Have you ever bit into a gingerbread cookie or what should be a crisp sugar cookie only to find it's soggy?
Now that it's cookie season, we need to talk about the No. 1 rule of cookie storage: Never store your crispy cookies and chewy cookies together.
Why? It's like a form of osmosis: the crisp cookies will absorb the moisture in the chewy cookies, softening their texture and losing their crunch. The chewy cookies, meanwhile, will dry out, diminishing their characteristic softness. Avoid this by keeping similarly textured cookies together: Crispy Gingersnaps And Crunchy shortbread In one container, and Fudge Chocolate Chip Cookies And Chewy sugar cookies in another, etc. (On the same note, you should also keep strongly flavored cookies separate so their flavors don't bleed into each other: you don't want your Gingerbread cookies Taste like Peppermint Slice-and-Bikes!)
That means that if you're shipping cookies of different textures and/or flavors and using one container, first tuck them into cellophane bags to keep them separated and in tip-top shape.
Photography by Patrick Marineello; Food styling by Yekaterina Buitsova
About the container: An old-fashioned cookie jar is nostalgic, but not the best vessel for keeping cookies optimally fresh. Instead, opt for an airtight vessel like this one Prokeeper + cookie storage containerWhich has a strong silicone seal to lock in freshness. And if you use it to store soft cookies, it comes with a terra cotta insert, which adds moisture to help cookies retain their chewy texture for longer. (Like A Brown sugar saver!)
Another tip to keep soft cookies soft
One more tip to keep softer cookies from losing their chew? Consider adding a slice of white bread to the cookie storage container. Similar to the terra cotta stone that comes with our cookie storage container, the bread slice provides moisture that creates a moist environment inside the container; That excess moisture is then absorbed by the cookies to keep them from drying out and becoming hard.
Ready to bake? We have 46 classic holiday and Christmas cookies to bake this year.
Prokeeper + cookie storage container
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$22.95
cover photo (Earl Gray Cookies) by Patrick Marinello; Food styling by Yekaterina Buitsova.