Anonymous wrote:These answers are all wrong. Sorry to sound rude, but I found out after years of baking chocolate chip cookies for my family at Christmas. The trick is to keep your dough cold while baking. Make your dough (with real butter) in advance. Refrigerate it. I make mine the night before I’m going to bake. Then if you’re making multiple trays of cookies, let your cookie sheet cool down after you take the first batch, it only takes a minute or two. Then take your dough out of the fridge and scoop your second batch of cookies. Your dough goes back in the fridge while that batch bakes. It has to stay cold until it’s in the oven. Keep repeating until the dough is all gone. These cookies will have the crispy edge and the chewy texture you want in a chocolate chip cookie.
Your “trick” of keeping the batter and cookie sheet cold/cool works because if the dough and sheet are hot, the butter will melt, causing the cookie to spread and thin, becoming crisp. Keeping the dough cold and the sheet cool will mitigate that. Using parchment paper will keep it cooler as well. Molasses/brown sugar instead of granulated sugar adds moisture.
Strangely, making cookies with melted butter instead of softened butter will actually give you a dense chewy cookie because the melted butter coats each grain of flour and the water in the butter activates the gluten, increasing the chewiness. If you do this, definitely refrigerate the dough before baking.