Being on a gluten-free diet for the past 4 years, there are few things I missed more than chocolate chip cookies; and I'm referring to the batter and the baking process, as well as the finished product.
Cookies are more than the resulting crispy treats; for me they include the process of making them with my daughter, sneaking tastes of the batter along the way, and "licking" the bowl while the smell of baking cookies wafts through the house. Well, with this recipe I get almost all of it back.
I remade my recipe today, this time taking careful notes so I could publish the recipe on my website and write this blog entry. As usual, I ate a good deal of the batter along the way, but was still excited to see the resulting cookies still taste as good as "the real thing" as any other gluten-free cookie I've ever tasted.
The history of this recipe began with an Good Eats episode, which included a recipe for Gluten Free Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'm a huge fan of Good Eats for general cooking techniques and was excited that Alton had applied his brand of "food science" to the gluten intolerant. It didn't take long for me to try his recipe. The cookies were excellent!
But they left me a little disappointed because they were (as intended) quite chewy/cakey. My truly favorite style is the crispy variety of chocolate chip cookie, where the cookie is crispy all the way through, with an ever so slight burnt taste on the edges.
So I went about modifying the recipe to make them crispy. Some changes were ideas inspired by Alton Brown himself (the host of the Good Eats TV show), others I discovered through experimentation. I changed the ratio of white to brown sugar, eliminated the egg-yolk and changed other proportions until I got the consistency I was looking for. The result is the recipe I made this afternoon. Please enjoy it and leave your comments here.
Every gluten-free recipe for baked goods has certain trade-offs when wheat flour is replaced with "something else." These cookies are no exception, so here are some of the pros and cons of this recipe.
How They Are Just As Good as Wheat-Flour Cookies
- Delicious!
- Crispy through and through.
- Raw batter is almost indistinguishable from wheat-flour based batter (my kids can't tell the difference)
- Resulting cookies can be made a little cakey inside (if that is what you like) by "mounding" the dough on the cookie sheet rather than flattening the dough a little.
- Graininess: The rice flour provides a slight graininess to the cookies that you don't find in "real" cookies. Some of the reviews I've had actually find this adds an appealing distinctiveness to the cookies, but there is a real difference here from regular cookies.
- Out-Of-Oven: When they first come out of the oven and are warm, they are like little cakes: in other words they don't have that gooey, just-out-of-the-oven sinful goodness of "real" chocolate chip cookies. Once they cool, they are as good as the real thing, but they can't do what real cookies do right out of the the oven.
Let me know what you think, whether you have other favorite recipes, or have ways to improve on mine!
