The Sweet Pantry Ingredient To Make Store-Bought Cookie Dough Taste Homemade (And Extra Chewy)

For those of us who lack the time and patience to make fresh cookies as frequently as we want to eat them, there is store-bought cookie dough. Say what you will about break-and-bake cookies, but they come with some serious advantages — namely, consistency of product and a lack of mess.

There are many ingredients that take chocolate chip cookies to the next level. But our favorite ready-made dough hack is one of the most impressive of all. It will bring you close to homemade flavor, along with elevating the texture of your cookies to heavenly levels of chewiness. The secret? Brown sugar, which you likely have in your pantry already, even if you didn't make the cookie dough yourself. Mixing your store-bought dough with brown sugar, with or without the addition of extra butter, will result in cookies that are moister, chewier, and altogether more delicious. This improvement may even trick your loved ones into thinking you spent hours channeling your inner Keebler elf. 

It's not a coincidence that most cookie recipes use a combination of brown and white sugar. Sugar is not only necessary for sweetness; it enables the Maillard reaction to take place as it caramelizes, browning the cookies and lending them toastiness. Brown sugar specifically contains molasses, which is slightly acidic. Combined with the baking soda in your recipe, it triggers a leavening effect that gives your sweet treats their prized texture. Cookies without brown sugar just won't get chewy. It makes sense, then, that extra brown sugar elevates the consistency of store-bought dough and gives cookies that fresh-from-the-mixing bowl combination of crispy edges and cakey middle.

What's the easiest way to incorporate extra brown sugar into ready-made dough? Simply use a food processor to make mixing cookie dough easy. Just a couple of teaspoons of brown sugar should do the trick. For the most tender cookies ever, drizzle some melted butter into the mixture as well. You'll love the end result so much that you may never want to mess with cookies from scratch ever again. While we're on the hack train, you can also consider baking your store-bought cookie dough in the air fryer for a treat that's ready just minutes after you get a hankering for dessert.