This month marks one year since I stopped eating gluten! Let’s celebrate with cookies!When I first kicked the gluten, I heard so many horror stories about how hard good gluten free baking is, that it took me at least three months to even try. I’m here to tell you it’s totally possible and easy (albeit not always inexpensive) to make tasty gluten free baked goods (bread notwithstanding, because that still eludes me). In general, I’ve found that swapping Cup 4 Cup flour (my fave all-purpose GF blend) for regular AP flour works most of the time, with great results. For example, Smitten Kitchen’s all butter pie crust with Cup 4 Cup is a gluten free revelation. I’ve also learned the joys of mixing a few different flours, like millet, oat, and brown rice, in recipes from The Bojon Gourmet and Snixy Kitchen, particularly some dense, moist, amazing cakes.
However, the best, most passable GF baked dessert I’ve made are these chocolate chip cookies, which are a dead ringer for the chocolate chippers of my childhood.
When I was growing up, my dad was the baker in the family, and his go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe was from our family’s go-to cookbook, the Original Fannie Farmer. My dad was a wonderful person, so I don’t want to tarnish his reputation posthumously, but I have to be honest here… he preferred his cookies crispy, crunchy, and nearly burnt! Travesty! Amanda and I always wondered why other kids’ parents made big, thick, soft, pillowy chocolate chip cookies, while our parents made thin, wrinkly, flat, crunchy cookies. When we got older, we discovered that he had been overbaking the cookies all those years, to suit his own tastes. With a little less time in the oven, the cookies went from thin, wrinkly, flat, crunchy little disks… to thin, wrinkly, flat, crispy-on-the-outside but chewy-in-the-center, salty, buttery, perfect cookies, with all the nostalgia of childhood and none of the overbaked crunch.
Amanda and I dubbed these cookies Wrinkly Fannies, because they’re wrinkly around the edges and they’re a Fannie Farmer classic. However, I must issue a warning: since first posting about wrinkly fannies over eight years ago, a British friend told me that fanny/fannie means lady parts where he comes from, and I was essentially calling my cookies wrinkly vaginas. As a proud feminist, I stick by this name.
In the past year, I’ve made these cookies a ton of times, trying all different GF flour varieties, and this is the combo I like best. I think the trick to a great gluten free cookie is a heavy butter to flour ratio. You taste the butter and brown sugar and salt here, not the flour. If you’re used to fluffy, thick chocolate chip cookies, you might assume that the lack of gluten is what makes these different, but that’s just how a wrinkly fannie rolls.
Classic Thin Chewy Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies
(Wrinkly Fannies)
(Wrinkly Fannies)
I like the specific flours listed below. You can, of course, just sub in an all-purpose GF flour for all flour, or use any 1:1 gluten free flour for the Bob’s portion, but I found the flavor and texture to be the most true to the original with this exact combo. If you use a blend that includes xanthan gum, then leave out the additional xanthan gum. Of course, if you're not GF, just use regular AP flour and no gum. Note that unlike many popular chocolate chip cookies, I wouldn’t recommend chilling or “curing” this dough for hours in the fridge, or freezing uncooked dough balls for later—that causes the garbanzo bean flavor in the Bob’s blend comes through (it doesn’t come through at all otherwise). These are very buttery, so use parchment paper rather greased baking sheets.
¼ lb (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened ½ cup dark brown sugar Scant ½ cup granulated sugar 1 egg ¾ teaspoon vanilla ½ cup Bob’s Redmill Gluten Free All-Purpose Baking Flour (garbanzo bean base) ½ cup + 2 tablespoons gluten free oat flour ¼ teaspoon xanthan gum ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon baking soda 1 to 1.5 cup chocolate chips (I like mixing dark, semi-sweet, and milk chocolate) Flaky sea salt (like Maldon) | Preheat oven to 375 F, and line cookie sheets with parchment paper. In bowl of stand mixer with paddle attachment or with hand mixer, cream butter, then gradually add the two sugars, beating until light and smooth. Beat in egg and vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift together flours, xanthan gum, salt, and baking soda. Add to butter mixture and mix until blended. Stir in chocolate chips. Chill dough for about ten to twenty minutes (not much longer), then drop tablespoon sized scoops a couple inches apart on lined cookie sheets. Sprinkle a pinch of flaky sea salt on each ball. Bake for 8-10 minutes, until lightly browned and starting to crinkle up around the edges. Let sit on sheet for a couple minutes before very carefully (the cookies will be pretty fragile until they’re fully cooled) moving to cooling rack. |
