This 3-Ingredient Bread Cookie Hack Is Questionable, To Say The Least

Every now and then, you'll come across a viral recipe that probably should've been kept in the drafts. A hack for making cookies has been making the rounds recently, and for being so simple, it couldn't possibly be true. Apparently, all you need to do is mash up bread with water until you get a dough-like consistency, fold in some chocolate chips, and then bake them to make the easiest cookies ever.

Some folks have been saying the recipe works surprisingly well, while others aren't fans of the resulting texture. Chowhound can confirm the texture issues — the batch we made in our tests felt less like cookies in the mouth, and more like badly made biscuits. They were firm on the outside and mushy inside, without any of the characteristic crumble of a good cookie. In terms of flavor, they tasted like wet toast and chocolate, and would probably rank lower than even the worst store-bought chocolate chip cookies.

This, of course, is exactly what you might have expected. Bread and cookies are nothing alike; there's a vast difference between their respective fat content, gluten development, leavening agents, and flavorings. Mashing bread up with just water will only result in bread paste; it won't magically conjure everything it needs to become cookie dough. While the recipe can indeed give you something that resembles a cookie, that's as far as it goes. If you want to make a viral treat, you're better off making the "Martha Stewart Fired Me" cookies instead.

The recipe can still sort of be salvaged, however. The dough of a chocolate chip cookie gets its flavor from three key ingredients: sugar, butter, and vanilla. Adding these three to a second batch resulted in cookies that taste much more like real chocolate chip cookies.

While the flavor was improved, the texture was only marginally better. The cookies still felt like dense, mashed-up bread beneath a crunchy exterior, but it was also slightly lighter than the batch made with only water. It's possible that incorporating actual cookie-baking techniques — such as creaming the sugar and butter together — could result in a better bite, but that would also complicate the recipe to a degree that you might as well make cookies from scratch, anyway. The point, after all, is to be able to make them when you're feeling lazy; using techniques that are anywhere remotely close to pro-baker tricks for chocolate chip cookies is out of the question.

If you can get past the texture, this six-ingredient version of the viral recipe might actually be worth your time. It's possible that it might not even be an issue as long as no one's expecting the texture of a cookie; the additional fat from the butter helped the texture transition from bad to just different. All in all, the modified bread cookies were surprisingly enjoyable, incredibly easy to make, and would probably satisfy most cookie cravings in a pinch.