The Secrets to the Best Crinkle Cookies

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.

The crinkle cookie has always been a magical being.

It emerges only at the holidays. It starts its journey as a tightly rolled snowball. Thirteen minutes later, it leaves the oven coiffed and wearing a wedding gown, through a baking process I will just call decorative explosion.

But while it may be mostly magic, there are proven tricks to making a good one that I learned by consulting food stylist Jesse Szewczyk and making a lot of—a lot of—the genius version in his first solo cookbook, Cookies: The New Classics. And, maybe most importantly, Jesse introduced me to a crinkle cookie flavor that might make these your most memorable batch yet.

Secret #1: His recipe starts with a simple, one-bowl method, creaming butter and sugar to beat in lots of air. "A guaranteed way to get those cracks is to just shove as much physical air as you can into it," Jesse told me. The air will expand in the hot oven, so: more air, more expansion, more dramatic crinkles.

Secret #2: The dough needs to be thoroughly chilled, so the cookies stay soft and poofy and don’t melt into chewy-edged pancakes as they bake—at least 2 hours, but overnight or even a few days ahead is fine.

Secret #3: As Jesse learned from pastry chef Ben Weiner, rolling the dough first in granulated sugar means that the confectioners' sugar has a handy layer to stick to, without absorbing into the dough. In other words, the lace of its wedding dress won’t have any surprise nude patches.

Secret #4, the most genius of them all: Up to this point, the secrets have been technical and structural, and could be applied to any crinkle cookie, from chocolate to red velvet to lemon lavender.

But what makes Jesse’s cookies even more magical is how he flavors them. He triples down on the vanilla, because he found it’s almost impossible to overdo it. And he replaces the salt in the recipe with preserved lemon rind, bashed in along with the butter and sugar to infuse thoroughly into the dough.

Preserved lemons have been documented in North Africa for a thousand years, and have had long histories in Middle Eastern and Indian cuisines as well. They generally appear in savory dishes, since the lemons are pickled in a salty brine. But more recently, as chefs have been searching for ways to add salt and complexity to their desserts, they’ve popped up in everything from Yossy Arefi’s ice cream to Nadiya Hussain’s traybakes to Rebecca Firkser’s lemon bars.

Jesse’s crinkle cookies don’t scream preserved lemon, but they taste richer, more aromatic, and more balanced in a cookie tin because of it. Consider it the latest trick from the magical being this holiday season needs.

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