I loved baking cookies as a kid, as I’m sure many others did. The best part, of course, was shaping them. I would plunge my little fingers into the sticky dough and then vigorously roll a portion between my hot palms until it was smooth and greasy. I liked to test the limits of how big a cookie could be and how many nibbles of raw dough I could sneak. Undoubtedly, I came away with butter in my hair, sugar under my fingernails, and a pile of unevenly baked cookies.
For my little-kid self, I wouldn’t change a thing. But adult me has found a better way, one that offers its own kind of tactile pleasure and the same sense of accomplishment: the Norpro Grip-EZ 2-Tablespoon Stainless Scoop.
Using a cookie scoop, which pops out tidy balls of dough with a squeeze of the handle, is a lot neater than rolling balls of cookie dough by hand. But honestly, that isn’t the main advantage, since making cookies is going to be messy, whether you’re dunking your bare hands into the dough or not. The real benefits—efficiency and consistency—are ones that I came to fully appreciate only after I began spending time baking in professional kitchens and being regularly faced with a bowl of dough the size of my torso.
A good cookie scoop can make quick work of portioning a large batch of dough and can ensure that every cookie is the same size and shape. This is nice not just for serving up professional-looking results but also for ensuring that everything bakes at the same rate. That way, you don’t end up with cookies that are crispy when you were hoping for something gooey and chewy.
