Rye-Flour Chocolate Chip Cookies

Dessert
A woman holds four large rye-flour chocolate-chip cookies in her hands.

The chocolate chip cookie.

One of the pillars of the American dessert canon, and one of the simplest, right? There’s no pie crust to conquer, no cake that might fall. Making chocolate chip cookies is so straightforward that it’s one of the first recipes American children are taught to make.

Easy, right?

Until the beginning of this year, I would have agreed without question. I’ve made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of chocolate chip cookies over the years, and never had much issue. Until now.

Enter: the rye chocolate-chip cookie, aka, my nemesis.

I knew exactly what I wanted: a chocolate-chip cookie for the adult palate. It should be less sweet and with a deeper flavor, just enough different to be noticeable, but not so full of rye that it would make you think you were eating health food disguised as dessert. Since I already have a stellar chocolate chip cookie recipe, thanks to my mom—to this day, hers are my hands-down favorite—I figured I could start by simply substituting some rye flour for all-purpose. I did a little research and decided that a 30% swap would be a good place to begin.

Things started going wrong almost from the beginning. Even though I followed the recipe and the measurements exactly, my dough looked greasy. The cookies tasted fine, but they spread more than I wanted them to and didn’t have the body or heft I was looking for. I made a few adjustments and tried again and again and again, reducing the amount of butter, adding more flour, toying with the ratio of white sugar to brown sugar. And along the way, I learned some things.

1. Butter. There were two variables at play here: European vs. American butter, and different types of European butter. European butter has a higher percentage of butter fat than American butter and thus a lower percentage of water. In baking, the two are not necessarily interchangeable; according to the inimitable Stella Parks, swapping American butter for European is a “fundamental alteration” of a recipe. Stella suggests using less European butter and slightly more water to make up for the differences.

In Stella I trust, so I decreased the amount of butter but that didn’t solve the problem—my cookies were still coming out greasy. I couldn’t understand what had changed, until the next time I went to the grocery store.

When we moved to Rome, our closest grocery was a Coop so I bought Coop store-brand butter for baking and had good results. But at the start of this year, our Coop became a Conad, so I switched to their store-brand butter. Conad butter must have a different percentage of butterfat, because every time I used it, and no matter how much I reduced the amount of butter that I used, I ended up with greasy cookies. Out of desperation, I switched to Lurpak, which solved the too-greasy issue. That left me free to move onto…

2. Flour. Great, my cookies were no longer greasy. Unfortunately, they were also super soft and delicate, not the hefty, sturdy types I was looking for. I couldn’t understand the issue, since I was using tipo 0 flour, which was supposed to be the Italian equivalent of all-purpose flour. “Supposed to be” is the key phrase here, as buying flour in Italy is not as simple as it is in the U.S. Here, can you buy flour not just by how finely ground it is (tipo 00 versus tipo 0, for example) but also by type of wheat—grano duro (hard wheat) versus grano tenero (soft wheat)—and that’s even before you get into whole wheat flour, chestnut flour, rice flour, chickpea flour, etc.

After much trial and error and Googling, I found that my cookies performed the best when made with “Manitoba” flour. Named after the Canadian province from which the variety of wheat originally came, farina di Manitoba is soft but has a relatively high-protein content. It’s usually recommended for bread, but I found it gave me the texture and structure I was looking for.

3. Brown sugar. Although American-style brown sugar comes in light and dark varieties, they behave similarly in baked goods if you need to swap one for the other. Here in Italy, the closest thing to brown sugar that I’ve found is zucchero di canna integrale atado dolce, or whole cane sugar. It has a bit of molasses flavor, but much less than American-style brown. It also isn’t as moist and has a grainier texture. It’s delicious, don’t get me wrong, but took some getting used to since it behaves differently.

4. Salt. The last problem I needed to solve for was salt. I relied on primarily on recipes developed by and for U.S. cooks, which made sense—I learned to cook in the U.S. and chocolate chip cookies are one of the few things we can (mostly) call our own. But U.S. recipe developers were, of course, using U.S. ingredients, and most called for table salt or Diamond Crystal kosher salt, neither of which are available in Rome. “Sale fine,” a grind of salt somewhere between the two, is commonly available and what I keep on hand. It took a few tries to get the exact weight correct.

Now that I’m writing it out, I realize that I spent months developing the perfect rye chocolate chip cookie for my Italian kitchen, and that when (if?) I move back to the States I’ll have to test the recipe all over again. Frankly, that realization just makes my above statement that much more true: this recipe has been my nemesis. Thank goodness that it’s also my new favorite cookie recipe.

Rye-Flour Chocolate-Chip Cookies

Sources: Inspired by Milk Street

Makes ~17 cookies

Active time: 30 minutes; total time 12 hours

Ingredients:

  • 140 grams rye flour
  • 200 grams room-temperature butter
  • 150 grams sugar
  • 150 grams brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 15 grams vanilla
  • 250 grams farina di manitoba or all-purpose flour
  • 5 grams baking soda
  • 12 grams salt                                                                                              
  • 225 grams chocolate chips (I like a mix of dark, milk, and white)

Directions:

  • Toast the rye flour in a skillet over medium heat, stirring regularly—especially as it gets hotter—for about 8 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool when the flour is browning (it won’t brown uniformly, which is fine; that’s where the stirring helps) and giving off a toasty, popcorn-y scent.
  • In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugars until well-combined and fluffy. Add the eggs and vanilla; incorporate well.
  • Add the flour, baking soda, and salt. Incorporate lightly, then add the chocolate chips. You’ll want the dough to be cohesive, but not too much so—over mixing can affect the cookies’ texture. Cover the dough and let it rest in the refrigerator overnight.
  • Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C) degrees. Weigh the dough into ~70 gram portions and gently roll these into a ball—don’t roll them too smoothly, or this, too, will affect the texture of the final cookie. Sprinkle each ball with sea salt and bake for ~10 minutes. Let them cool, if you can, on a wire rack before devouring.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *