Classic Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chewy but tender in the center. Crispy and lightly browned on the edges. Packed with chocolate chips and a slight hint of vanilla flavor. These are all simple properties but yet somehow so difficult to find in a vegan chocolate chip cookie! While I’ve shared some iterations on this theme in the past, like my coconut butter cookies, a standard version eluded me for a while. Thankfully though, I’ve learned a lot over the years and I finally have a no-frills, classic, easy vegan chocolate chip cookies recipe that I’m happy with.

So here it is: my exhaustive guide to vegan chocolate chip cookies and a defense of why my recipe is (at least according to my preferences and my taste tasters) the best ever 🙂 if you don’t want to read my vegan cookie novella, feel free to click the ‘Jump to Recipe’ button above and get straight to it!

File these cookies under #VeganButNotHealthy. This is a decadent treat that happens to be made from plant foods, so don’t expect to be pleased with the healthy and nutritious macros or anything. Just enjoy a gooey warm vegan chocolate chip cookie straight from the oven, and be happy 🙂

Vegan chocolate chip cookies without the egg

Over the years vegans have come up with various creative ways to substitute for eggs in cookies. Let’s discuss a few…

• Ground flax: When flaxseeds are mixed with water they form a gelatinous substitute that provides some binding power. Flaxseeds have a flavor of their own and a brown flecked appearance. They work pretty well in cookies, although the cookies can get just slightly gummy because the cooking process does not alter the flaxseeds’ texture.  No hate from me though, 7/10.
• Applesauce: I’m still scratching my head about how this became a formal egg substitute, since applesauce and eggs share very few properties. Applesauce will make your vegan chocolate chip cookies crumbly and prone to burning.
• Banana: Don’t try me. Do not try me. If you want cakey, banana-flavored eggless cookies with an odd burnt flavor, then go ahead and use banana.
• Cornstarch: Cornstarch works surprisingly well as an egg replacer in cookies! It does a good job of tightening the dough, but when combined with coconut oil it can just make cookies very slightly cakey.
• Commercial products like Ener-g: I don’t use these products and I can’t advise on them. I wanted to create an egg-free chocolate chip cookie that everyone can make.
• Aquafaba: Ding ding ding! The holy grail of vegan chocolate chip cookies. Available in cans at every grocery store I’ve been to lately. Buy a can of chickpeas, borrow a few tablespoons of liquid from it, and you’ll have an egg alternative that replaces the proteins from eggs, providing binding and softness without gumminess. Aquafaba is the essential ingredient for making CHEWY chocolate chip cookies that won’t fall apart and are even a little bit bendy.

Coconut oil used wisely

The majority of vegan chocolate chip cookies you’ll see on the internet call for coconut oil. Many of the rest of them without coconut oil, call for vegan butter or margarine. I really wanted to create a margarine-free version because I’m not a big fan of the aftertaste it has and I don’t want you to have to chase down a specific brand.

The fact remains, however, that coconut oil and butter are not interchangeable. Butter contains a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fat, and also has a percentage of water content; whereas coconut oil is nearly completely saturated fat with no water content. Substituting it 1:1 for butter in a cookie recipe will result in a greasy vegan cookie that spreads too thin.

To get around this while still using supermarket ingredients, I experimented extensively with butter substitute based on a blend of coconut oil, regular vegetable oil (or toasted walnut oil if you’re feeling naughty), and a splash of non-dairy milk. I settled on a ratio that makes reliably awesome cookie dough (I use the same technique in my vegan snickerdoodles) by matching the proportions of saturated fat, unsaturated fat, liquid, and protein solids, and adding a small amount of vinegar to mimic butter’s slightly acidic component.

Miscellaneous vegan choc chip cookie notes:

I’ve been working on this cookie dough in various forms for a long time, and I’ve learned a lot:

• Measure by weight. Please heed my words. Measure by weight. Get a kitchen scale and use the weight measurements. My volume measurements are also accurate, but not nearly as precise.
• These aren’t good gluten-free 🙁. I hope to have a GF version for you someday, but substituting gluten-free flour directly for the all-purpose flour did not have a nice result in my testing. I will report back on my results using oat flour, almond flour, and some other options I am exploring.
• Always be chill. Don’t skip on chilling the dough. It’s so important for getting the right texture.
• Cylinders! I discovered something interesting once when I was trying to rescue a batch of cookie dough that I knew was too wet. If you form the dough into vertical cylinders rather than spheres, the rate at which the crust forms compares more favorable with the rate at which the cookie border expands. The result is a chewier cookie that is much less likely to get flat, and displays that pretty marbled pattern on the surface from the top of the cookie dough cylinder sinking into itself. (Whew, I’m not sure if that explanation made as much sense as I wanted it to, but I tried!)
• Vegan chocolate chips: At natural grocers and some regular grocers, brands of vegan chips available include Enjoy Life (the best, in my opinion) and Sunspire. Most of the most well-known name brands contain milk, but oftentimes, store brands are also vegan, e.g. 365 brand at Whole Foods. If you cannot find vegan chocolate chips, go ahead and use a milk-free semisweet chocolate bar (which should be much easier to find) cut into chunks. Yum!
• Vegan sugar: Standard white sugar and brown sugar are usually processed with bone char. Strict vegans will want to choose a brand of cane sugar labeled as being vegan, such as Florida Crystals.

In conclusion… y’all. The following are real comments that I received from a tester of my final trial run of these chocolate chip wonders. “The cookies are sensational, holy s***. Better than any vegan cookies you can get off the shelf. Comparable to an excellent non-vegan chocolate chip cookie.”

You heard it here first: these vegan chocolate chip cookies are better than store bought and only take about 30 minutes to whip up! I hope you give these little gems a try, and if you do, let me know in the comments or by tagging me @yupitsvegan in your photo on Instagram!

Finally, I can confirm that the dough can be premade a day or two in advance and refrigerated and baked successfully, but I haven’t tried it longer than this. I suspect it would also freeze well. Bon appetit!