Nyt Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies – A recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies that can be made from a lot of recipes… Luckily I could guess! We’ve tested 12 top-rated vegan chocolate chip cookies and highlighted the pros and cons of each, ensuring you’re sure to find the perfect match! Read on to find our number 1 pick.
Have a special place in my heart – after all they were the subject of my first ever Bake Off Bake in 2017! I’ve also tried vegan baking in the past and experimented with many, many mediocre/disappointing recipes.
Nyt Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies
I was so excited to take a more methodical approach to finding a really good vegan chocolate chip cookie (and excited for your enthusiasm for more plant-based, dairy-free baked goods). Let’s dive in!
Famous Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies
The main ingredients in traditional cookies to convert to vegan are: butter, eggs, sugar/brown sugar and chocolate chips. Here are the ingredients I used in the tests:
Why isn’t regular sugar vegan? Most commercial sugar is treated using coal during the filtration process. If you want to stick with vegan ingredients, look for organic sugar (if it’s USDA-certified organic, it won’t use coal) or brands like Zulka.
Why aren’t regular chocolate chips vegan? Many commercial chocolate chips contain dairy ingredients such as whey, milk fat or milk solids. However, there are more and more brands of vegan or dairy-free chocolate chips available, as well as “accidentally” vegan brands (ie, a few popular brands of vegan chocolate chips include Enjoy Life, Trader Joe’s, Guittard, and Sunspire dairy-free chips. See this for a complete list.
Which coconut oil should I use? Refined coconut oil is best for a neutral, non-coconut flavor (I’ve found that virgin/extra virgin doesn’t matter, refined vs. unrefined makes the biggest difference). Use unrefined coconut oil if you don’t mind a more coconut flavor.
Bourbon Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookies (small Batch Chewy)
Which brand of vegan butter is best? I only tried the Earth Balance Vegan Butter Sticks that I used for this test because of their texture and wide availability. However, I have heard great reviews of Miyoko’s vegan butter and there are tons of vegan butter reviews online. (Let me know if you’d like to see a vegan butter baking test from me!)
What should I use as an egg substitute? Many vegan cookie recipes don’t actually contain eggs – often the dough can achieve a perfectly moist, emulsified texture without eggs. However, some recipe makers choose to include “flax eggs” or “chia eggs” as a humectant/binder additive. Of the recipes I tested, two recipes used flax, but most contained no explicit egg substitutions.
First, my traditional disclaimer: I’m an amateur baker, and baking 9-12 recipes in a day will almost certainly result in a few mistakes. In this particular test, I’m pretty sure I accidentally left out sugar from America’s Test Kitchen, which is why their score is so low, so please ignore these results! I will test them again and report back.
While the numbers don’t really back it up, I felt that in this batch of recipes, overall the cookie textures were great and they stacked up well compared to conventional cookie textures. As a group though, I found the overall flavors to be a bit lacking – most felt a bit bland to me. But for those who love thick/fluffy/soft cookies with gooey centers (ie me), we found quite a few winners!
Espresso Chocolate Chip Cookies
Fats: The three key fats used in all the recipes are: coconut oil, vegetable/canola/olive oil, vegan butter (plus some added peanut butter on top). Interestingly, there is really no clear correlation between the fat used and the overall rating. First place (Ovenly) and fifth place (Cake Over Steak) use oil, second place (Baker by Nature) and fourth place (Oh Ladycakes) use coconut oil and third place Well Vegan uses a combination of vegan butter and coconut oil.
If anything, vegan butter recipes fare worse (New York Times and Liv B), but not enough to draw a firm conclusion. I don’t think you can get enough flavor out of any of these fats (maybe regular coconut oil, but refined coconut oil was surprisingly very subtle in these cookies!), so it was more about the fat interacting with the rest of the ingredients for texture rather than taste.
Sugar: Since plant-based fats tend to add less flavor than, say, butter, I found that a mix of sugars (brown and white) was an important way to add more flavor and depth to a recipe. Several recipes used coconut sugar, which added another element of toasted, caramelized notes. However, taste comments indicate that coconut sugar can also increase the potential for grainy texture (perhaps if not carefully incorporated).
Chocolate: I’ve seen other bloggers talk about chocolate bars versus chocolate cookies and I can’t sing enough praises for Trader Joe’s pound plus bars!! They are VERY CHEAP – you get way more bang for your buck compared to a packet of vegan chocolate chips and the chopped chocolate chips make just such beautiful and delicious cookies compared to your average chocolate chips. We should
Ingredient Tahini Cookies
Size: In general, larger sized cookies were rated higher – which I believe is related to the fact that larger cookies can often have a more desirable texture in terms of crunch and a gooey/soft center. This is a minor factor that I think may have skewed some of the smaller cookies towards the lower end of the scale, although they would have been absolutely wonderful as standalone cookies.
These cookies sounded so promising – they call for “vegan brown butter” which is coconut oil with pecans. However, they were A
The recipe calls for soaking pecans in 3/4 cup coconut oil for 8-10 minutes on low heat, finally finishing with 1/2 cup infused coconut oil – which is not filling (since the oil is supposed to reduce by 1/4 cup in 10 minutes at low heat?) After adding a full 3/4 cup of cooking oil I had left over to the batter, I ended up with a soup batter that baked in these pools of holes that then burned out.
If you REALLY want to try them (I mean coconut oil with pecans, SOUNDS amazing!), I recommend just 1/2 cup of coconut oil to start with. Otherwise, don’t waste the ingredients.
Tahini Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies
As I noted earlier, I screwed up this recipe so we won’t talk about it – except that I’ve made this recipe before and I remember liking it a lot. It’s identical to the Hummingbird High recipe (discussed below), except it uses almond butter instead of tahini – so in theory it should have a similar result, but just a slightly different flavor profile.
Developed by brilliant cookbook author and recipe maker Erin McDowell, this recipe aims to democratize the famous NYT cookies for everyone, vegan and gluten-free alike. Erin is based on vegan butter with flax eggs and a mixture of cane and coconut sugar. When baked in 3.5 ounce talls, they were surprisingly similar to the original (which I made a few weeks ago). In terms of taste, they are so tainted with chocolate that it was hard to taste the cake itself, but it definitely has a good level of salt to combat the excessive sweetness. As a plus, they can easily be made gluten-free if you use almond flour instead of regular flour!
These cookies look absolutely amazing (“chonky” according to one taster), and I was disappointed to see how low this vegan chocolate chip cookie ranked overall. The common feeling from tasters was that it was a bit “grainy” with a “burnt sugar taste” – I wonder if the grainy comments come from the use of coconut sugar or chopped chocolate chips.
There may be an element of baker’s error here, but our cookies turned out to be evenly baked – meaning a little drier in the middle, where I would have liked more of the gooey factor in the middle. One taster said they detected an “unwanted healthy taste” which I believe may come from the flax, which may be a bit of an acquired taste. As a standalone cookie, I think they will still appeal to the crowds. I will definitely make these cookies again, but maybe I will try to bake them a little shorter.
Salty Sweet Peanut Butter Sandies + Salted Tahini Chocolate Chunk Cookies
I almost skipped this recipe because it’s a self-improved version of the Ovenly recipe for a healthier version, swapping out the sugar for maple syrup and coconut sugar, neutral oil for olive oil, and chips for chunks. It includes an optional cooling step that I have left out. I’m glad I didn’t leave them out because this recipe resulted in a completely different type of cookie.
Lumpy and thick, these cookies are smaller than Ovenly (partly due to the completely different look), but also because of the lack of sugar, they don’t spread as much (although I expected them to spread more with the maple syrup ). Overall, they remind me of a tastier version of the many “healthy breakfast cookies” I used to make. Soft and rubbery texture with a slight bitterness,