“For so many of us, chocolate-chip cookies are the cookies we grew up with,” says Dorie Greenspan, baking expert and renowned cookbook author. “One bite, no matter whether it’s a great or average cookie, brings back childhood and good memories.”

Few things can challenge the taste of nostalgia, but why settle for something "average" at this point? If we live in a culture where “chocolate-chip cookies are just about built into our American cultural DNA,” according to Greenspan, shouldn't we hold them to a higher standard? To turn out chippers that are worthy of your recollections, you’re going to have to rely on your own instincts, your pantry, and your oven.

And Dorie, of course. 

The baking whiz—whose next book is aptly titled Dorie’s Cookies—has a few tips of her own to help resolve your home-cooking frustrations and set you on track for impressive cookie specimens. These might be cookies that are crisp, or ones that are chewy; they might be big, or small, or cake-y kind of cookies. But they must be sweet, salty, and chocolate-y all at once, says Greenspan. "With a good chocolate-chip cookie, every bite is different. I love that element of surprise."

Here is the complete guide to making chocolate-chip cookies at home. 

Your cookie-making process begins with sticks of unsalted butter softened on the counter for 20 to 30 minutes. The goal here is to encourage the fat to get pliable enough to blend but not surrender completely. “When you’re baking a cake, you want the butter to be soft,” she explains. “Soft butter (which, by extension, is warmish butter) will aerate when it’s beaten with sugar and it’ll contribute to the cake’s rise. But you don’t really want chocolate-chip cookies to rise, so you’re fine with butter that’s just soft and warm enough to blend easily with the sugar.”

Or, to speed things up, Greenspan recommends cutting the butter into small pieces and waiting just a couple minutes before beginning to mix. (More surface area means faster softening.) For a batch of three dozen, start with 1 cup of butter (that’s two standard-sized sticks, or 16 tablespoons).

Most chocolate-chip cookies feature two different types of sugar: brown and granulated white sugar. The proportion of one to the other is the key to both texture and taste. The brown sugar contributes both moistness—which ups a cookie’s chewiness factor—and the caramel notes essential to a good batch. The white sugar adds a more neutral sweetness and heightens the crunch factor. “I play with the ratio of white to brown, going heavier on the white when I want crunchier cookies, or heavier on the brown, when I’m after chewiness,” says Greenspan. Dark brown sugar makes cookies taste more molasses-y than light brown sugar, but both work.

To start, 2/3 cup each of granulated and brown sugar is a good measure. You can always reduce a recipe's sugar slightly, especially if your chocolate is milk or white rather than semisweet.

All-purpose flour is your best bet for classic chocolate chippers. A cookie is an indulgence after all, so its dough is arguably not the place to tinker with any healthy flour options you might be hoarding. Nonetheless, whole wheat, nut, and specialty flours can still add interesting toasted notes to a cookie’s flavor. So, keeping the amount of flour equal, you can try experimenting with swapping out a 1/2 cup or so of all-purpose for an alternative  flour. Greenspan has been adding ground nuts, buckwheat, and whole-wheat flour in her latest book’s recipes. A good measure for your batch of three dozen is 2¼ cups of flour.

You might think that chocolate-chip cookies are all about the sweet factor, but in fact it’s the salt content that separates decent cookies from the masterpieces. “Just as in savory cooking, salt seasons what we bake,” explains Greenspan. “And so I use it to play off the flavors of the brown sugar and vanilla extract and to make the flavor of the chocolate jump out.” She adds at least a teaspoon of salt to every batch of dough. Fine sea salt works best here.

Herein lies the actual process for making your cookies: in a large bowl, blend together the butter with the sugars. You want them to be very evenly incorporated, but you don’t need to beat for much longer than a minute or two. An electric mixer can help speed the assimilation of the ingredients, but your strong arm and a wooden spoon will accomplish the same result. Next, crack in an egg. Some recipes call for one, which makes a denser cookie; others call for two, which leads to a slightly cakier texture. Blending in the egg will make the mixture seem creamier and fluffier. Sprinkle the flour, the salt, and a teaspoon of baking soda, for leavening, and mix that just until the flour is no longer visible. That's the dough. Now, you’re ready to add chocolate and mix-ins.

For champion cookies, you’ll want to keep the chocolate but lose the chips, says Greenspan. “Most store-bought chips are made with inferior-quality chocolate,” says Greenspan. “They’re there just for emergencies.” Instead, buy bars or slabs of your favorite bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate and cut them into chip-sized pieces. (Use a serrated knife for darker chocolates, which are brittle.) When “real” chocolate melts, it turns completely gooey, whereas the chips stay more solid, becoming almost gel-like in the oven.

Another bonus of doing your own chopping is something Greenspan calls “chocolate dust”—the confetti-like bits that fly off as you hack. “I mix the dust into the dough because I really like having chocolate flavor throughout the cookies and the tweedy look that the dust gives the cookies is great,” she says. In the neighborhood of 2 cups or 10 ounces of chopped chocolate is the right amount for this recipe.

The caramel-y notes of a good cookie dough base play well with masses of other flavors besides chocolate, making the dough a tasty blank canvas. Firstly, remember that “cookies welcome all kinds of chocolate,” says Greenspan, which means you might sub some milk or white for some of all of your semisweet. Nuts, especially when they have been toasted, complement the brown sugar and chocolate extraordinarily well; pecans, walnuts, and hazelnuts are winners. Dried fruit and shredded coconut can be nice. Kitchen-sink ingredients—from broken pretzels, to potato chips, to minced candy bars, to teaspoons of espresso powder—are yours to toss in. Spices, like cinnamon or nutmeg, can elevate a cookie from familiar to unusual.

The important thing with tweaking, says Greenspan, is that “you shouldn’t mess around with the quantities of flour, butter, eggs, any liquid and leavening, or the proportions of these ingredients in the recipe.” But add-ins? Sure! Customizing what you throw in at the end is the safest medium for your creative genius.

Chocolate-chip cookies can be small or large or even enormous—that is, if you want to smash the dough into a pie plate to make one giant cookie. Your choice. To get obsessive even cookies, though, you can use an ice-cream or cookie scoop, or weigh lumps on a scale. Eyeballing works fine too. Roll each piece of dough into an approximate sphere—cookies will spread out slightly unevenly, so don’t be too perfectionist here—and set them at least 3 inches away from each other and the edges on baking sheets lined with parchment or silicon mats. Really do leave that space in between! “Chocolate chippers are spreaders,” says Greenspan.

You can make the dough in advance—in fact, some beloved recipes require that you do, since many bakers believe that resting time in the fridge hydrates the flour and improves the cookies’ texture, says Greenspan. But, if it’s instant gratification you want, you’re not missing much by skipping this step. You can also freeze cookie-dough balls on a baking sheet until solid, then pack them into an air-free freezer bag. “When you want a cookie, pull out as many scoops of dough as you need, leave them on the counter to warm a bit while you preheat the oven, and then bake them. They might need another minute or two in the oven, so keep an eye on them,” says Greenspan.

To prepare to bake, you’ll want to preheat the oven to 325°F and arrange the racks in your oven so they divide into thirds. Cookies bake in the neighborhood of 8 to 12 minutes, depending on their size; bigger cookies need more time. (A cookie cake needs at least 20 minutes.) Halfway through baking Greenspan suggests that you rotate the sheets both from front to back and from top to bottom, for even cooking. A finished cookie should be golden brown, set around the edges, and soft—but not raw—in the center. Watching the cookies for these cues is a better way to turn out well-baked cookies than relying solely on your timer.

Leave the cookies on the sheet for a minute or two after they emerge from the oven, then slide the whole piece of parchment carefully from the baking sheet to a rack. (A rack lets air circulate around the sweets, so their bottoms don’t get soggy.) After about 10 minutes, the cookie will have cooled enough to stay in one piece when you grab it. But, warns Greenspan, warm is not the only way to savor a cookie: “I want to make a plea for enjoying the pleasures of a room-temp chipper. I think that letting a cookie cool should be considered part of the baking process, since the texture of a cookie doesn’t really come into its own until the cookie is cooled.”

Bring back the cookie jar! We'll never say no to a cookie that's gooey, warm, and fresh, but the brown sugar does seem to sing even more prettily after a couple days’ storage. “When it comes to flavor, some cookies, especially those you add spice to, need a few hours, if not a day, to give the spices a chance to make their presence known,” Greenspan explains. Plus, if you have cookies waiting for you in a jar on the counter, you can really tap into the nostalgia. Pour a glass of cold whole milk and reach for a truly tasty after-work cookie.