The Step That Ensures All Levain Bakery Cookies Are The Same Exact Size

Given the popularity and omnipresence of the timeless chocolate chip cookie, it's rare to find a bakery doing something special to set its chocolate-studded treats apart from the thousands of others found in bakeries and home kitchens. Levain Bakery, however, has achieved just that with its unique, pleasantly dense, and highly domed cookies. In our exclusive interview with Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald, the founders of Levain Bakery, we gained insight into how the bakery's hefty cookies achieve uniformity before baking, namely that each cookie is weighed by hand.

Everything at all Levain Bakery locations is made fresh every single day, keeping the bakers very busy. In addition to all the other breads, loaf cakes, and pastries that Levain offers, the brand's signature cookies are baked fresh in multiple flavors. We already know scales are essential for baking, but Levain bakers take this to another level. To ensure a perfect product, they portion and weigh every cookie by hand to a perfect six ounces. Weighing each cookie acts as a safeguard after portioning to ensure that every cookie is uniform and consistent, something that can be difficult to control when humans are churning out large quantities of baked goods rather than a machine.

Not only are the weight and size of Levain's cookies uniform to each other and across the bakery's locations, but the flavors and textures are all identical as well. "Consistency is something we are always focused on maintaining," McDonald and Weekes explain, which ensures that customers can expect the exact same cookie experience no matter the location.

The cookies at Levain Bakery can be polarizing due to their massive size, but if you don't feel up to wolfing down a large cookie in just a few moments, their larger-than-most size makes them ideal for sharing. On the other hand, if you don't feel like sharing, Levain's cookies actually hold their moisture and texture well for at least a day after purchasing, to which I can personally attest. I am lucky enough to live within walking distance of Levain Bakery's first Los Angeles location and have personally seen the bakers weigh each cookie individually as they portion them out for baking.

If you visit a Levain Bakery location that's not too crowded, take a moment to watch the show evolving around you. When looking around, you'll see bakers studiously mixing and weighing cookies before sliding trays of identically portioned dough into the wall of ovens that spin and rotate the racks inside while baking. It's all quite hypnotic. If you don't have access to the bakery's famed cookies, grab your scale and try your hand at making them yourself with our copycat Levain chocolate chip walnut cookie recipe.