ON THIS WEEK’S episode, senior Test Kitchen editors Shilpa Uskokovic and Jesse Szewczyk are here to introduce Bake Club’s first ever vegan offering: Jesse’s Chocolate Chip Cookies with Olive Oil and Sea Salt.
If there’s one thing we know, it’s that chocolate and olive oil are a match made in heaven. (Just look at our Chocolate–Olive Oil Cake for proof!) Both have that delightful fruity-meets-bitter complexity. Plus, the added bonus of olive oil is that it keeps baked goods moist for days—including cookies! Jesse’s goal in making this cookie was to make sure it came out perfectly chewy with a crisp exterior, all without the addition of eggs or butter. And he did just that!
Jesse walks us through all the nerdy development details that make this cookie a hit, including a primer on the role of fat in a cookie, the best way to chop your chocolate, and what exactly did he mean when he said to cook the flour to a “desert sand” hue? Shilpa and Jesse also tackle listener questions and end the show by chatting with a true baking icon: the one and only Dorie Greenspan (of xoxoDorie latest cookbook ).
Listen now to the behind-the-scenes intel on these delicious vegan chocolate chip cookies that will inevitably make it into your holiday rotation this year.
SU: But today we're going to be talking about Jesse's accidentally vegan recipe, and it's all about his very delicious olive oil chocolate chip cookie. Jesse, you are the cookie king. Or should we say the cookie monster?
SU: It's a wonderful, beautiful book and everybody should have a copy on their bookshelf. And Jesse, after writing such a book of all the cookies out there, why did you think about bringing this particular one to Bake Club?
JS: Yeah, so this cookie wasn't originally a vegan olive oil cookie, but more on that later. But I haven't made a cookie for the Bake Club. I think perhaps it was time I should give the people what they want and do what I'm good at. And I was finally ready to do this. I am healed. I am ready.
JS: So you're going to start by actually cooking a portion of the olive oil and a portion of the flour in a pot. You're essentially making a roux here. You cook it until it turns the color of desert sand and it smells nutty. It's quite unusual. It kind of smells like roasting coffee. And then once that's that kind of tan color, you take it off, put it in a bowl and let that cool.
Then from there it's a bit more normal. You're going to go in with the rest of your olive oil, brown sugar, white, sugar, vanilla and water, a sizable amount, a third cup water, more on that later too. And you're going to whisk that together. Then go into your dry ingredients. So salt some flour, some baking soda and powder. Mix that up.
And then you'll finally add in six ounces of chopped bittersweet chocolate, and that's the whole dough. You're going to scoop it out and put a little bit of flaky salt on them before you bake them, six per tray, bake them off. And that's the whole recipe.
JS: Yes, like a bakery style cookie. And the sweet potato was giving me a dense, soft, chewy, too far in that direction all around everywhere. And also the little bits of sweet potatoes sticking out were kind of weird.
JS: Yes. And I think to really make it taste good, I would probably roast it, but this was just becoming a pain. So then I was like, "What is our Bake Club love? Our Bake club loves chocolate olive oil cake. Why chocolate? Olive oil is good." So I'm like, "Olive oil chocolate chip cookie sounds kind of cool." And perhaps maybe on the third iteration or whatever, I was like, "I don't need an egg. Oh, wait, it's vegan."
JS: So because they're vegan and I decided to go down that route, there's no butter. It's olive oil. Both are flavorful, but in different ways. So I needed a way to bring flavor and color to this cookie that was lacking because there aren't those products. And so I toasted just part of the flour. It's just a third a cup of the flour I toasted.
And I'm trying to think in my mind, "Oh, cookies start by browning butter. What if this starts by browning something else?" And it's a similar flavor profile and that it's like this undefined caramelized, roasty, toasty base note that grounds the cookie. So that's where my mind was.
JS: Yeah, it's crazy impactful, actually. When you make it, your kitchen smells strongly of a bread that is deeply, deeply baked. It's crazy.
JS: Not in a good way. It's like saying, "Oh, if a teaspoon of espresso powder is good, why not half a cup?" is what you're asking. But then B, on a technical level, toasted flour acts different. I've found that it almost acts as though the gluten making abilities have died.
JS: So it's like it doesn't provide structure, it doesn't produce gluten. It is just there for flavor and bulk really at that point. So if you did too much, I feel like something would happen to your texture in a bad way.
JS: Sure, sure. Yes, you can use chips and I've seen people do that. Okay, so chopped chocolate, flavor-wise, it's good. It's good in that it creates these irregular pockets that remain molten. Even when a room temperature, they're still a bit pliable. I feel like they mingle with other fat. I just like the way that they taste and the way that they give up and nestle into the dough.
But secondary, I think of chopped chocolate as a fat source kind of. It contributes to the spread of the cookie. It's not just an add-in. It melts in the oven. So I think of it like it is melting with the cookie. It is pulling the cookie down and outward the same way that butter does. So this recipe is specifically calibrated with that in mind.
So if you're using chips, the spread might be slightly less. So it is functional as well as a flavor preference. If you're using Fev's, and for people who don't know, Fev's are big oval shaped discs.
JS: Yeah, you're forced to agree with me in this episode. Preference, you can use other things. The texture will be slightly different. Your spread will be slightly different, but not a huge deal. If you're using think, I don't know, something else like a peanut or something dry, not fatty, think of that as a wall. Instead of pulling it down, it's keeping it in place. Does this make sense?
JS: Yes. And the biggest difference you'd see is someone who chops their chocolate very finely because then it's truly acting like a fat ingredient. If you've chopped it to the point where it's dust, it just integrates into your cookie dough and acts as fat. It just becomes one with a dough and we'll continue the spread. If I'm being completely honest, I dice my chocolate bars.
JS: I cut the chuckle bar in half vertically, then cut each vertical in half again, so you have four planks. And then I just dice that into perhaps third inch slices. But then the next one I do somewhat the same thing, but on a diagonal because I want the dices to be your regular sized. So that's where I'm in life.
JS: The first thing people struggle with the most is that they don't know how to measure flour properly, which is not their fault. It is the system's fault. I say this every episode, if your cookies are consistently fat or dry or not spreading or not cracking, it's-
JS: ... perhaps you didn't use a scale. Number two, people over bake their cookies because a beautiful, stunning cookie like in a photo shoot oftentimes is really browned and really gorgeous because that color is so nice. But I think if you take it really far in the browning, you've compromised the texture of the cookie.
You have to think of the cooling process as part of the baking process when it comes to cookies. The texture of the cookie, when you take it out of the oven is not the texture of the cookie you're going to get once it's cooling. That sheet tray remains hot for a while, so that's a few seconds or whatever minutes of some extra heat applied to it.
Then as it cools, the fats kind of solidify. The chocolates begin to solidify. It exhales the extra leavening and settles into place. So when the cookie is firm on the outside, when you touch it, when it has some browning, but it's still a touch soft in the center, you can pull it out.
Number two is that, yeah, it needs to have the right texture. So the chew to crisp combo. I don't like a dry cookie unless it's meant to be a shortbread or something, obviously. But I think that the chew often relates to your sugar ratios, brown to white. And I think dialing that in. So your textures are this beautiful juxtaposition of chewy to crisp is really important for drop cookie.
Spread is really important. There's so much of variability with certain recipes with spread, and it makes me so sad when I see that. And I think a good recipe has to have consistent spread across anyone who makes it, which measure your flour. Right? And then, yeah, I mean I like a crinkle, but again. Hey, but if it's supposed to crinkle and it doesn't like a crinkle cookie that's a bad cookie. Yeah.
JS: Yeah, it's delicious in its own right, but I am so deep in it that I have these really set technical ideas of what a cookie should be and that doesn't fall into that. So my closed-mindedness is bad.
JS: That's a good question. I guess my only advice would be I would avoid things that are labeled finishing or drizzling. The more high-end ones are really strong usually. Really grassy, kind of peppery, kind of spicy, which I think while interesting would perhaps be a bit too much here. Honestly, like a middle-of-the-road brand. Good, but not like you know.
SU: No. Bano writes on the BA Bake Club substack, "Yum. These were very easy to make. Love the slight fruitiness of the olive oil. I doubled the recipe to make 24 cookies and was only able to bake 12 last night. I refrigerated the cookie dough overnight and baked the remaining 12 this morning. There's definitely a slight difference in texture and I want to attribute it to the first batch drying out a little overnight relative to the freshly baked batch. How do you decide whether or not to refrigerate cookie dough?" This question is a gift for Jesse. Everybody sit back.
JS: Everyone sit down. Okay. Refrigerating cookie dough. Listen, there is a camp of people who say, "Aged." That's the term they use. Cookie dough is better in a plethora of ways. There is some truth to that. When you refrigerate cookie dough overnight, I think the sugars will dissolve more. I think that the flour will hydrate more.
But when a recipe developer tells you to refrigerate cookie dough, typically what they're doing is they're solidifying the fat source so they spread less in the oven. It's a way that you can have a higher fat content cookie with less spread because cold fat in a hot oven will spread slower and the cookie will begin to set into place. Versus if you have a very fatty cookie dough, you put it straight in the oven, it's just going to melt away.
So I do think for the most part, people refrigerate cookie dough for that real specific reason. In terms of the aging and stuff, I don't know people got fired up because I said that I'm not a fan of it. People were, they came after me.
JS: Yes, thank you. Thank you. Open the door. Don't do it. People are like, "Jesse, I made a recipe but I refrigerate overnight because I heard it's better." Or, "Should I do this because I heard it's better?" I'm like, "Did I tell you to do that?"
JS: Listen, Bano, this is legit because she batched the recipe. I get it. She's in the clear, she's safe. Okay?
SU: Not related to Jesse Szewczyk. Okay. So a comment from our beloved Tim with a photo. And Tim says, "I made these this afternoon and they were mostly successful. They're really tasty, but turned out a bit darker than in the recipe image. I think I probably cut the chocolate too much and had too many tiny shards that blended into the dough. I also made eight large and six smaller because of sheet pan space. I'm sure this is part of the testing process, but the large ones are much better. The smaller cookies lose most of the chewy interior and ended up thinner and crispier.
JS: ... mahogany. Yeah, mahogany. It's got almost a red hue to it. They're very, very dark. So the saga here, Tim first made these. And I told Tim, "Perhaps you chopped your chocolate too finely so it turned to dust." And I said, "Crazy move. Sometimes I put my chopped chocolate in a colander and I shake it up and then I use the big bits." Cool. He made them again. Dark again. We chatted. This opens up a can of worms. Tim is not in the US. Brown sugar I believe might be a different product than what we use.
JS: Perhaps, yes, perhaps it is like a muscovado sugar, but it's labeled brown sugar because in the US our brown sugar is quite light. It's very fluffy. It is actually just refined white sugar that has molasses in it typically.
JS: So at first I was like, "Dammit, Tim Szewczyk is over-baking my cookies." And I'm like, "Wait, this is just a translation error."
JS: And I don't have the answer, honestly. I don't have the full scope here. I would love to research or reach out to a sugar company or something, but I do just think it's a difference in ingredients.
SU: Yeah, I'm looking at the picture and you can see that the smaller ones have more uneven edges. And I'm wondering if the type of sugar has also affected the way it spreads. Okay. So two I think important lessons from Tim's cookie. Is one, there is such a thing as cutting your chocolate too fine so try not to do that.
SU: And then the second takeaway, which I think Tim made the conclusion himself, you made them a particular size and you made them a bit larger because you wanted them to spread and have that nice contrast between the crispy edges and the chewy center.
SU: Lily had a similar question about making smaller cookies. She writes, "I'm a sucker for a salty cookie, and these turned out great." Three exclamation marks mind you. "I'll definitely be coming back to this one in the future. My only gripe is I had no idea what color I was aiming for with desert sand," which, listeners, is what Jesse uses to describe the color of the toasted flour. "I had to pause-
SU: Oh my god, Lily, bless you. "If I wanted to make them smaller, can I just do smaller dough balls and keep the recipe as is or would I need to adjust the baking time?"
JS: Okay, first of all, desert sand. I was going to say, "A light tan." I don't know, pergola wood flooring, an apple box.
JS: You can go into the website and edit it. Okay. And the smaller ones, yes. Listen, you can make them smaller. If you make them smaller just do, yes, reduce the baking time, but perhaps you would miss out on the browning effect that takes place from an extended bake. You can totally, just with that caveat. And desert sand, I deeply apologize for this. I really thought I did something there and I clearly didn't.
SU: And Katie has cookies on a baking sheet with a square of brown parchment paper. And sadly for Katie, she has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cookies on the sheet tray and they've all sort of baked together. They run into each other and there's just one massive cookie with scalloped edges. It looks like a big mutant cookie. And then Katie says, "This counts as one cookie, right?"
SU: And then Jesse, I guess you responded to Katie already and you asked her, "How did the dough feel before it was baked?" And then Katie replied and she said that the dough was really soft, but the cookies were still delicious. What do you think happened?
JS: There's a few things that could have happened. I asked the question about the dough texture because I think that if you didn't cool that initial olive oil flour mixture and you make your dough, it's going to be warm and it does have slightly more fluidity to it at that point, which then hotter fat or warmer fat in the oven spreads faster. So it could just be a temperature issue.
The oven thing also is interesting because it also goes back to the concept of the exterior forming. So when the exterior of our cookie forms from the heat, it sets things into place. So if your oven is too cool, the exterior is never going to set. So if you're checking the oven constantly, opening it, constantly saying 350 drops to 300, then it drops to 280 and it stays at 300, you're going to have a slow, gentle spread without any set happening to keep them in place. And I think that's actually the likely culprit here. Yeah.
JS: But if I was developing this recipe, I'd be like, " Oh, they look nice. I just need to add some more flour." You know what I mean?
JS: Yeah, it could be a combo, one or the other. If I was putting money on it today, I'd say your oven was cold. Yeah.
SU: "I'm trying to figure out if I blew past desert sand into Texas soil territory. I watched the video." And by that Meg means the social video that Jesse made on Instagram. "I watched the video for color, but maybe the light is different in my kitchen. I did really like the cookies and they definitely had a savory vibe, which makes me think I went over. If I served them to someone who didn't know they were vegan cookies made with olive oil, would they be able to taste the fruitiness or would it be super subtle?"
JS: I do think perhaps you blew past desert sand because like I was saying, toasted flour is a strong ingredient. If you take it to a darker place, you'll taste it and it will overwhelm the dish. In terms of should I taste olive oil? Yes, I think you definitely taste it. Is it fruity? Not like a glass of wine or a fruit, but you definitely taste olive oil. So I do genuinely think that this is just a matter of over-toasting the flour. And I think that I've learned in this episode that desert sand was a really stupid descriptor on my part.
JS: And this month we are joined honestly by a legend. She's the author of last I checked, 15 cookbooks? She's nodding. Including multiple New York Times bestsellers. She has won several James Beard awards, has won the Cookbook of the Year award from IACP and not just once. And is truly one of my biggest baking inspirations and truly a baking hero. She has a brand new book out, it is called Dorie's Anytime Cakes. And if that name didn't give it away, it is the one and only Dorie Greenspan. Dorie, welcome to the Bake Club.
JS: Yeah. Dorie and I met, we're trying to figure out four, five, maybe years ago. And I feel like I just instantly wanted to be your friend.
DG: So I am a baker, a writer, a cookbook author, a mother, a grandmother, a wife. I am a self-taught baker. I started baking. This is probably more than you want to know, but I burned my parents' kitchen down when I was 12. I didn't cook or bake again for all sorts of good reasons-
DG: ... until I got married. But I was 19 when I got married, and so I taught myself to cook and I had a very patient husband. And a couple of years in, I discovered that what I really loved was baking. And so I was a student and I would go to school and I would come back. And I'd bake and then I worked and I would come back and I would bake. Then I worked and I went to graduate school and I come back. And finally I realized that was what I wanted to do. And I wrote my first cookbook, 30... 1991. The math is, what is it, 34 years?
DG: So I think what interested me, what grabbed me is really the same thing that interests me and grabs me now. I love the process as much as I love the final bake. I love working with my hands. I love the way ingredients change as you're working with them. I think the oven is magic. I mean, it's like some sort of magical black box that makes delicious things. The truth is, yeah, I love that people love desserts. So it was fun to be able to make things and share things and get that kind of encouragement.
DG: I'm easily excitable, so I don't think I have a favorite. And I still do things. When something comes out of the oven, I pad it a little love tab because I'm so happy that it's right. Or when I first learned how to roll out a dough and fit it into a tart pan, I still get excited about it. It's such a pleasure. And so you want other people to have that. So I don't have a favorite. I'm a equal opportunity baker.
DG: Joshua wanted cookies. And I had made what I considered a very special kind of cookie. It was the cookie... I made various kinds of cookies. I loved making sablés, so French shortbread cookies. And I made them in rings. So they looked... No matter what you did, they were beautiful because they were all the same size. And so we were noodling around and Joshua loved my sablés, he loved the jammers. And we thought, well, we could make that into a line. And he's really a designer. And so the idea that they were so beautiful and so symmetrical. And they were delicious.
JS: Yeah, time is weird. The construct, what is time? So now that you've returned to cakes and you have a new book, do you want to tell us about that?
DG: Yeah. This was kind of an accidentally cake book. I was asked to do a story about holiday cakes. And I said I couldn't do it because in my mind, holiday cakes were big, frosted, special occasion cakes. And my heart is really in simple cakes, simple cookies. So I said, "Sorry, I'm not your girl. But," I said, "for the holidays, you've got people coming in, you've got house guests. You need something that just sits in the kitchen. Something that is on the kitchen counter. People can come in, take a little nibble, go back."
And so I developed three kitchen cakes. And you know how it is when you concentrate on something and you're working on it? You're focused in such a way, your brain opens up to more ideas, even though you're concentrating on one. And so as I was working on these three, I was thinking, "Oh, but I could do this and I could do." And so the book was born. And originally the reading title, the subtitle was Simple, Simpler, Simplest. I understand why the editor said it was hard to pronounce.
JS: So Dorie, today's episode is about my recipe for chocolate chip olive oil cookies, which are accidentally vegan. I have a listener question from the Bake Club. Sometimes we like to ask guests to try to jump in and help us. And for reference, my recipe, after it comes out of the oven, it gets banged, wrapped a few times to deflate them slightly. So this is a question from Christina C, who made them. And she wrote, "I had never done the sheet pan banging trick before. What does that do? And could you do it for any cookie or is it specific to certain?" And she says, "Thanks."
SU: Actually, you raised a good point and tying it back to the sablés that you used to make, you can't use it for cookies of that nature, I suppose. Like shortbread.
JS: For any listener who might be confused what we're talking about, basically for this recipe, when I take it out, I instruct you to lightly bang your sheet pan a couple times. And this is to forcibly remove the air in the cookie and they exhale a bit. They deflate a bit, which gives them kind of a more compact, fudgier, denser texture.
DG: So in Paris there's a baker Moko Hirayama from Mokonuts and she makes fabulous cookies. And she will tap the cookies with a spatula. She says David Lebovitz taught her to do that. And she had said, " Well, the cookie bakes more evenly that way. And I think what it does is essentially what the sheet pan bang does. Just deflates it somewhat. And it changes the texture a little bit I think.
JS: Me too. I know that Sarah Kieffer, she really popularized the pan banging technique. And I vividly recall, my partner's roommate at the time was baking them and she's not much of a baker but we heard violent banging. And I think she slightly misunderstood. She was smacking that sheet and these cookies were a little beat up.
DG: And of course, it has to do, as you were saying, cooked and compact. I'm thinking we all love a warm cookie, but really, the texture of the cookie doesn't come into its own... The texture of most things that are baked don't really come into their own until they're cooled.
JS: So sometimes our food is very fresh and then Chris will say, "Well, of course it's good, it's warm."
SU: Okay. Where are we with the state of chocolate chip cookies in this world? I'm curious to know your take because Jesse has a hot take in that, as somebody who wrote a cookie cookbook and a very good one at that, he said, "The world doesn't need another chocolate chip cookie recipe." So putting this out there took a bit of a convincing, I think from-
JS: I think this is a good roundtable because Dorie obviously cookie expert, but Shilpa, I don't know if listeners know Shilpa owns a bakery. This is her side job here. And this bakery is often noted as having the best chocolate chip cookie in New York City. It's often on those lists. So I'd like to hear from both parties here.
SU: Okay. At Honey's Bakery we call it a triple chocolate chunk cookie and we use three kinds of chocolate. We use dark, milk and white chocolate and a little bit, and we vary the proportions. They're not always in equal ratios. We do mostly dark and then a little bit milk and then even less of the white chocolate, but it's nice to have it in there.
And then we use large chunks of the cookies, not chips. And they're very big cookies. They're over a quarter of a pound each. They're six ounces. And we scoop them and bake them. We let the dough rest overnight and then scoop and bake. And these cookies are massive. They're like the size of a baby's face.
DG: So I can't imagine that the world doesn't need another chocolate chip cookie. As I listened to your cookie, I think. You described your cookie. I think, "I need that." But a few years ago in Paris I saw Cédric Grolet making cookies and he was making his version of a chocolate chip cookie. And it was the first time I had seen someone round a cookie, take a round... Help me, help me.
DG: And then François Perret, who was the pastry chef at the Ritz, he just left after 10 years, made a cookie that I have in the new book. I called it a cookie cake. I stretched it, but essentially it's that same idea.
DG: So the base of the cookie is baked and then you go to town on top. You can put chopped chocolate on top, you can put nuts, you can put caramel sauce, you can sprinkle some interesting sugar or some salt on top. And I think of that now as the Paris cookie. But is it a new chocolate chip cookie? A new way of looking at it? Is it a way of reorganizing the ingredients that you might use otherwise? So I think the world needs, it's necessary.
SU: It is almost like a joke of a cinnamon bun. And in my text I said it was like something that you might find like a float in a Thanksgiving parade because it is just so big and so poofy, so goofy in a way. I learned a lot of things in making this dough. It actually started off as a sticky bun and there's a couple of secrets that I embedded in the filling. I'm actually very, very proud of this one and where it ended up.
JS: Okay, cut. Great. Well, bake clubbers, go grab some instant vanilla pudding. And once you bake, send us your pictures and questions. And there are so many different ways to get in touch.
SU: You can comment on the recipe, on the Epicurious app or on the Bon Appétit website. You can comment on our substack chat or you can email us at Bake Club at bonAppétit.com. And if you've made it and loved our cookie, please rate and review the recipe on our site.
