Who Needs Butter to Bake Cookies?: New-Fashioned Chocolate Chip Cookies with All Tahini and No Butter
I feel like tahini desserts are having a moment. I've been seeing more cookie and brownie recipes that call for the sesame paste and I finally decided to give one a try. There is a highly rated Salted Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe that was printed a few years ago in The New York Times, but I decided to try a recipe from Food52 instead. The NYT recipe uses both butter and tahini, but the New-Fashioned Chocolate Chip Cookies with All Tahini and No Butter eliminate the butter altogether. I was really curious to see how butter-less cookies would turn out. (And as a secondary consideration, the NYT recipe requires 12 hours of chilling before you bake the cookies, while the Food52 recipe can be baked right away.)
The method for making the dough is pretty much what you would expect for a chocolate chip cookie, except that you use tahini instead of butter. You beat tahini, sugar, and brown sugar; add eggs, cold water, and vanilla; add the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt); and mix in the chocolate chips. I portioned out the dough with a #30 scoop and got 29 cookies. I flattened the cookies before baking and they spread a good amount in the oven but maintained a nice round shape. After baking, they looked just like regular chocolate chip cookies except that they were more pale; I baked the cookies for 10.5 minutes.
I liked these cookies a lot. They had a distinctive sesame flavor that became less prominent over time; there was a big difference in the flavor between day one and day four. But my favorite part was the very chewy texture of the cookies. You couldn't tell that these cookies were missing butter, but then again, ounce for ounce, tahini has nearly as much fat as butter -- so it's not like trading out all of the butter for tahini improved the nutritional profile of these cookies in any meaningful way (although tahini certainly has less saturated fat than butter, and provides protein as well).
If you like sesame, this is a nice twist on a traditional chocolate chip cookie, especially if you like chewy cookies. They don't have the deep caramel flavor of a good chocolate chip cookie made with butter -- but I wouldn't mind having one of these every now and then for a change of pace.
Recipe: "New-Fashioned Chocolate Chip Cookies with All Tahini & No Butter" from Food52.
The method for making the dough is pretty much what you would expect for a chocolate chip cookie, except that you use tahini instead of butter. You beat tahini, sugar, and brown sugar; add eggs, cold water, and vanilla; add the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt); and mix in the chocolate chips. I portioned out the dough with a #30 scoop and got 29 cookies. I flattened the cookies before baking and they spread a good amount in the oven but maintained a nice round shape. After baking, they looked just like regular chocolate chip cookies except that they were more pale; I baked the cookies for 10.5 minutes.
If you like sesame, this is a nice twist on a traditional chocolate chip cookie, especially if you like chewy cookies. They don't have the deep caramel flavor of a good chocolate chip cookie made with butter -- but I wouldn't mind having one of these every now and then for a change of pace.
Recipe: "New-Fashioned Chocolate Chip Cookies with All Tahini & No Butter" from Food52.
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