Ask TracyFood: vegan chocolate chip cookies? 15 May 2007 11:41 pm
Posted by Tracy in : advice,baking,dessert,friends,Morning Glory,vegan,vegetarian , trackbackSo like I mentioned yesterday, I feel like I owe big favors to everybody at Morning Glory who worked last weekend and made it possible for me to go on my crazy adventure. When said adventure was still in the calling coworkers and begging for help and maybe crying a little stage, I may have invoked the power of cookies in an attempt to bribe people (instead I got to work today, but that’s fine, too; I still made it to the Urban Farm field trip just fine, and big thanks are once again due to the fabulous Chiara as the lovely Francesca made possible both my attendance and ferrying of classmates — yay!) But I digress. All that talk of cookies reminded me of the time a few months ago, when Cj wrote me:
Dear FoodTracy,
Hiya!
I figured if anybody I knew could answer this question you could: I want to make vegan chocolate chip cookies, but for a non-vegetarian to share with vegan friends. I would like them to taste as close to toll-house as possible to make the non-vegetarian happy, but using products that would allow them to be shared. I keep coming across recipes that involve banana (NO!) and no brown sugar. To me, a chocolate chip cookie à la the toll house recipe should not involve banana and should include brown sugar. I’m going to continue poking about the web, I thought you might have a handy recipe that you could just e-mail. If you don’t, don’t take any time on this! But, as is my usual policy, it never hurts to ask ;).
ttfn,
Cj
I wrote back:
* * * * *
Dear Cj,
I do not have a recipe handy, but I could make an Ask TracyFood article about vegan chocolate chip cookies… thanks for the idea! (I heartily agree about the brown sugar, by the way).
Cj replied that she had found two possible recipes. This one was her winner, requiring only a quick trip to her friendly local Wild Oats, but she was also intrigued by this recipe and filed it away for future reference, noting that “there were some other interesting recipes at that website that might also be fun.”
I replied:
I personally like the second recipe better but that’s mostly me rocking a knee-jerk aversion to egg replacer or egg substitute or whatever it’s called; I just don’t trust the stuff. It’s better than bananas, I guess, but still suspicious. The Post-Punk Kitchen says a lot of eggs used in baking really aren’t necessary, and Cooking for Engineers says if the eggs are just being used as leavener you can substitute 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1 TB vinegar, and 1 TB water, which intrigues me as I’ve made some pretty decent vegan chocolate cakes using the baking soda-vinegar reaction (the same one that makes elementary school science fair volcanoes, aww yeah). TPPK doesn’t have a regular vegan chocolate-chip cookie recipe, but they did have chocolate-chocolate chip (mmm, overkill!) and
and wheat-free chocolate-chip that’s easily adapted to use wheat flour but both of those use flax seeds or flax oil, which is a little mysterious to me. Their chocolate-chip blondies look good, though, and a lot of bar cookie doughs can be turned into regular cookie dough and vice versa, so that’s a real possibility (also the blondies use soy yogurt and sour cream or yogurt is the super-secret ingredient in my favorite nonvegan chocolate-chip cookie recipe, so that makes me happy).ANYWAY. I swear I did not go to any trouble to look any of this up because I lurrrrrve obsessing about food and now I can write something for the blog based on this super fun and easy research.
Thanks again for the ideas!
So big ups to Cj and chocolate-chip cookies! Even the wheat-free ones actually turn out to be appropriate, as at least one of the coworkers who made my weekend possible is a wheat avoider. Hurray!
