Why You Shouldn't Forget To Scrape The Bowl When Baking Cookies
You could have all the right ingredients, but if there's something amiss with your technique, your cookies won't turn out right. That applies to creaming the butter and sugar for the perfect amount of time, fluffing the flour before you measure it, and letting the cookie dough rest prior to baking. Since baking is an exact science, every little thing you do makes an impact on the overall outcome of your cookies — and one additional step that you definitely don't want to forget is to scrape the bowl.
While this might seem trivial, Eat This, Not That shares that scraping the bowl ensures that each ingredient gets evenly incorporated into the mixture. Jenna Huntsberger, head baker at Whisked, explained to the outlet that stand mixers are a major culprit of this because they cause the ingredients to stick to the sides of the bowl or settle underneath the mixing attachment. If you forget to scrape the bowl, therefore, the proportions of the ingredients in your cookie dough will be slightly off.
What happens when you forget to scrape the bowl?
If all your cookies look different, but they came from the same batch, there's a good chance it's because the dough wasn't mixed properly, which is usually due to an un-scraped bowl. Per King Arthur Baking, this translates to cookies with varying levels of spread and an uneven distribution of mix-ins if you're making a recipe like chocolate chip cookies. According to Serious Eats, this happens because it's mainly the butter and sugar that cling to the edges of the bowl. When you let a layer of butter and sugar build up instead of scraping as you go, you're preventing the two ingredients from being thoroughly mixed in. This results in a streaky dough with concentrated chunks of butter and sugar.
What you want to do, Eat This, Not That says, is scrape the bowl after the addition of every ingredient. When all the ingredients are added, remove the bowl from the stand mixer, and mix the rest by hand until you have a homogenized dough.