Ideal Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Buckwheat Chocolate Chunk Cookies

I'm not sure if I've ever baked with buckwheat flour before. But Thalia Ho's Buckwheat Chocolate Chunk Cookies looked so good that I couldn't resist. In the recipe headnote, Ho says that these cookies are her "ideal," and that the buckwheat has a "warm, nutty undertone."

To make the dough, you whisk melted butter with granulated sugar and light brown sugar; add an egg, followed by vanilla; incorporate the dry ingredients (all-purpose flour, buckwheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt); and stir in dark chocolate (I used Callebaut 2815 57.9% callets). I chilled the dough briefly before scooping it out and sprinkling the cookies with Maldon salt before baking. I used a #20 scoop and got 20 cookies from a batch.

I thought the color of the baked cookies was suboptimal -- while they were golden around the edges, the tops were a wan grayish hue. My first thought upon taking a bite was that they seemed to have an usually generous amount of chocolate, which I thought was a good thing. They also had a nice texture, crisp around the edges and chewy in the center. 

 

While I thought the cookies were good, I didn't think they were great. The flavor of the cookie itself was missing the deep caramel-y character that is my ideal for a chocolate chip cookie. And while I wouldn't have been able to identify the buckwheat, I could tell that there was something different lurking in the background. There actually isn't that much buckwheat in the recipe (80 grams of buckwheat flour, along with 250 grams of all-purpose wheat flour), but I was reminded a bit of what usually happens when I bake with rye and I end up thinking something tastes slightly off in the final product. 

Maybe it's just that my palate that hasn't yet learned to appreciate alternative flours, but I find a traditional chocolate chip cookie hard to beat.

 

Recipe: "Buckwheat Chocolate Chunk Cookies" from Wild Sweetness by Thalia Ho.