What will happen to my chocolate chip cookies if I add more or less flour than the recipe calls for?
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Depends on what you mean by "more" or "less"... How much more or less? Half? Double? A tablespoon? Give us some more information... – Catija May 19 '16 at 23:43
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3@Catija Let's not force the question to be too specific. It'd be sane for an answer to say, hypothetically, you won't notice anything change til you add X, from X to Y they'll get crisper, from Y to Z they'll get crumbly, past Z they won't even hold together. If the OP limits the question to certain amounts, she could easily miss out on the big picture. – Cascabel May 19 '16 at 23:53
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The recipe used would be helpful in giving answers scaled to it. – GdD May 20 '16 at 07:45
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I think it's possible to write decent answers without knowing a starting point; if the OP's recipe is already in the "more flour" direction they'll just be farther along the continuum you describe. But if you really want to know a starting point, you could assume it's the canonical Toll House recipe from the US that's on the back of basically every bag of chocolate chips (2 1/4 cups flour, 1 cup butter, 3/4 cup each white and brown sugar, 2 eggs, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt), which makes a generic kinda soft cookie. If the OP doesn't return to clarify eventually, I'll just edit that in. – Cascabel May 20 '16 at 16:11
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A general answer, because a concise answer would need an entire recipe.
(all ratios that follow are by weight not volume measures)
Flour gives the cookie structure. The commonly followed ratio is:
Cookie dough = 3 parts flour, 2 parts fat, 1 part sugar
That 3:2:1 ratio results in the most common cookie texture.
Adding more flour give you a hard cookie like: ginger snaps, short bread, etc.
Reducing the flour, like a 1:1:1 flour-fat-sugar will give a drop cookie and often chewy.
I Googled, and found this informative piece How to Invent a Cookie Recipe.
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Is this ratio actually correct? Based on the recipe posted by Jefromi in the comments above, that's certainly not a 3 to 1 ratio of flour to sugar (by volume, anyway). 2.25 cups flour to 1.5 cups sugar is 3 to 2 ratio. Considering that this recipe is for the "classic" Toll House recipe and it doesn't match your ratios, can you please explain a bit more about this? – Catija May 20 '16 at 16:19
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I edited in by weight. Toll House weights: 2-1/4 cups flour=306 grams, 1 cup butter=227 g, the sugars combined are 315 g. That's 3-2-3. The sugar is very high which is interesting because I consider Toll House to be too sweet. Ruhlman (the ratio guy), says rations are just the starting point. – Paulb May 20 '16 at 17:39
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The Toll House cookies might be a little on the sweet side, but they're not the only ones (e.g. the Serious Eats chocolate chip cookies) are about the same ratio, so I too have a hard time imagining 3-2-1 as a canonical chocolate chip cookie base. – Cascabel May 20 '16 at 17:42
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This guy seems to think so. http://product.design.umn.edu/courses/pdes3701/documents/ratio_cookies.pdf Note: his ratio numbers are opposite the sequence of Ruhlman (I don't know how long that link will live) – Paulb May 20 '16 at 17:46
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2@Paulb That's a scan from Ratio, right? (here's the same chapter in Google Books) If you look at the example recipes there, the ones actually using the 3-2-1 ratio are likely crisper cookies, and then the chocolate chip cookie recipe is 1-1-1 and the sugar cookie recipe is 3-2-2. So while Ruhlman does say 3-2-1 for some kinds of cookies, for chocolate chip and sugar his recipe is pretty darn close to the Toll House one. – Cascabel May 20 '16 at 19:49
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More flour will result in a "breadier" cookie. It will have more structure and be less chewy. Less flour will do the opposite, resulting in a softer, flatter cookie.
http://www.handletheheat.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies/
MattPutnam
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