Vegan Cookies Four Ways
One nut butter dough, four distinct cookies: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin pecan, ginger and black pepper, and (sort of) pignoli. Words and images by Kate Ray.
Welcome to Vittles Cooking! This week, baker Kate Ray shares her recipe for a versatile vegan cookie dough that embraces the opportunities afforded by cooking with plant-based ingredients rather than focusing on their limitations. A Vittles subscription costs £7/month or £59/year. If you’ve been enjoying the writing, then please consider subscribing to keep it running. It will give you access to the whole Vittles back catalogue, including Vittles Restaurants, Vittles Columns, and Seasons 1–7 of our themed essays.
Vegan Cookies Four Ways
One nut butter cookie dough, four distinct flavours: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin pecan, ginger and black pepper, and (sort of) pignoli.
I am not vegan. I will spread butter so thickly on my bread that I leave teeth marks when I take bites. When I buy cheese, I often get whatever’s weirdest and smelliest. But I don’t consider animal products a necessity in my diet, and when I began developing recipes for my micro-bakery in the Hudson Valley in New York, I decided to make them without eggs and dairy. The whole system feels too precarious: eggs have recently doubled in price due to bird flu, for example, and I didn’t want to be forced to rely on cheaper, factory-farmed alternatives.
I was also excited about the challenge – to prove that we didn’t need to rely on eggs and dairy to satisfy sweet cravings. Most people tend to think of vegan baking in terms of restrictions, what you can’t use. But I found almost as many benefits as limitations, especially once I learned to embrace the qualities of vegan ingredients. Olive oil can impart a melt-in-your-mouth quality to things like shortbread that I find more satisfying than butter. Removing eggs from cakes and enriched breads means that they go stale less quickly, and I don’t have to wait for butter to soften or pull out my stand mixer to cream it.
Perhaps because I’m not vegan, I don’t try to recreate every type of baked good in my kitchen. I don’t really do airy-spongy or light-flaky textures, which are more easily achieved by the whipping of egg whites or with melting butter. Instead I prioritise chewy cookies, rich brownies, and nutty carrot cakes.
I developed this cookie recipe when messing around with replacing butter with nut butter. It’s everything that I want from a chocolate chip cookie – caramelised on the outside and chewy on the inside, the almond butter in the dough perfectly complemented by a heavy sprinkle of salt on top. Best of all, it has proved endlessly versatile. I’ve tried the recipe with various types of flour, and all have worked, including gluten-free varieties – the nut butter not only provides fat, it adds a lot of binding power. I’ve also replaced the chocolate chips with various other mix-ins, and the dough proved itself adaptable to every one of my whims.
Here, I’m sharing the base recipe for my chocolate chip cookie along with three of my favorite variations: oatmeal raisin pecan cookies, ginger and black pepper cookies, and a pine-nut-stuffed version similar to pignoli. But feel free to adapt this recipe however you see fit, with different nut butters, flours, and fillings: the whole point here is flexibility and following your desires. Best of all, since there are no raw eggs, you can snack on the cookie dough as you go.
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Makes 12
Time 20 mins (plus at least 30 mins’ chilling)