Guest Post: Whole Wheat Almond Chocolate Chip Cookies

Today's guest poster, Maggie, is a student in the department where I work at the University of Chicago. I love to chat with her about food and to swap Chicago restaurant recommendations. She's an absolute delight (and the super genius who brought this gem into our lives). I've been bugging her for a while to do a guest post, and am so pleased that she agreed to share these cookies. Typically, and sadly, I don't get to try the food prepared by our guest posters. But these cookies! Maggie stopped by with a sample a few weeks ago and, friends, I was 100% smitten.

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Three years of graduate school has taught me the following—

1. Cookies and books are an even better pairing than cookies and milk.


2. It’s pretty easy to inhale an entire row of Oreos before finishing the preface.
   

Unfortunately, that kind of sugar/corn syrup habit is gross and unsustainable. This recipe for whole-wheat almond chocolate chip cookies is a better alternative.

My favorite cookie recipes are the ones written on the back of chocolate chip packaging. Trader Joe’s semi-sweet chocolate chips supplied the foundation for this variation, which substitutes whole wheat flour for white and uses half the fat. In the Meals; for Moderns spirit, I replaced the original recipe’s two sticks (1 cup) of butter with ½ a cup of grape seed oil. The switch had a substantial effect on the consistency: moist and chewy cookies, particularly satisfying given that they were made with all whole-wheat flour (none of that part-whole-wheat-part-white crap). The trick seemed to be first adding ¼ cup of 2% milk to loosen the batter and then sticking the dough in the fridge for an hour and a half before baking. What came out of the oven has been called, “chewy, light, not coarse or dry. best whole wheat cookie [Becky’s] ever eaten.”

(Too bad the pictures suck. Nabisco’s got better photographers.)


Whole Wheat Almond Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from the Trader Joe’s choco-chip bag, by Trader Joe

2 ¾ cups white whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ cup grape seed oil
1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
½ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup of 2% milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips
¾ cup sliced toasted almonds

Preheat the oven to 375. In a small bowl, mix together the whole-wheat flour, salt, and baking soda. In a second, large bowl, cream the grape seed oil, brown sugar, white sugar, milk, and vanilla. Beat in the eggs. You can do all this mixing with a wooden spoon.

Now add the dry ingredients to the wet ones. Stir in the chocolate chips and almonds. Cover the dough and let sit in the fridge for an hour and a half or so. Using a teaspoon, scoop the dough onto a lightly greased cookie sheet—I use grape seed oil for this too—and bake 8-10 minutes.

When they come out of the oven, let the cookies cool on a cut-open brown paper bag. There’s not much excess grease to these cookies but the paper bag will absorb whatever there is.

Once the cookies have cooled for a minute or two, eat a thousand of them.

Here, try one: