— Shavanta Fowler

Okay, so for the soft component of your question, moisture, right, is gonna be the short answer. And, uh, you can do that, um, in a couple of ways. I'll give you a, a couple of quick responses here. One is to include eggs, uh, which hold on to moisture. Uh, the other is to avoid, um, certainly overcooking the cookie, which will dry it out. And in fact, if you can err on the, um, I don't wanna say undercooked because we wanna fully bake the cookie, but gonna err on the, the shorter baking time, uh, in order to maintain the moisture in the center of that cookie, which is gonna give you, uh, you know, less crispiness and a little more chew. One way to do that is, um, uh, to roll out your portion out your cookie dough and roll it out into balls or scoop it out, roll it out, and then, uh, you can just gently press it. And then you can, uh, chill that and, and even, uh, freeze it. And then you'll, you're gonna pull it out as you stage it for baking for about 10 minutes. And then as you put that in the oven, the heat of the box there is gonna start that cooking process around the edges. By the time you get some of that light browning at the edge, uh, that the inside is certainly gonna be defrosted, it's gonna be on its way toward the down the path of cooking. And you wanna get it to the point where it still maintains a lot of that moisture and that that colder temperature when it, the dough in the oven right, is, is gonna draw out, right? That cooking process, it's gonna require more time, in other words, to heat up, uh, which is buying you time or maybe the cookie time, um, so that you can, uh, set yourself up to maintain moisture, uh, to the extent that you want. And that whole dance takes some practice, and it can vary depending on the type of cookie you're producing. So do take notes during the process. Okay? And then the other part of this, that chewy part is gonna be, uh, contributed, uh, from sugar and granular sugar, right? Is gonna be, uh, what you want to use. Brown sugar works very well, uh, because the molasses that's part of brown sugar sort of adds to that, uh, the moisture content, uh, while the, the granular component adds to the chewiness of that finished product.