Tahini is a great ingredient for chocolate chip cookies

Few treats can top a fresh, warm chocolate chip cookie. They have the right balance of sweet and salty, and they’re usually a little crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. But there’s always room for improvement over the classics, especially if you haven’t tried making chocolate chip cookies with tahini. Savory paste made from mashed sesame seeds may not be the first ingredient most people think of when it comes to making sweet treats, but don’t sleep on it as it brings an earthy quality and hazelnut to your biscuits which will make them even more irresistible. .

Tahini is a very popular ingredient in many Middle Eastern dishes, but many Americans tend to know it only for the crucial role it plays in hummus or other savory dishes like tahini chicken thighs. . If you think of tahini like its cousins, peanut, almond, and sunflower butter (which is made from sunflower seeds), it’s really not that strange to see it showing up in a baked good. In fact, many cultures have been cooking with tahini for generations—it’s time to give it a try.

Read more: Cake Tips Every Baker Wishes They Knew Sooner

Swap out some of the butter

Making chocolate chip cookies with tahini isn’t particularly complicated, but as with all things baking, you can’t just add more without making further adjustments. Baking recipes are designed with leavening, usually baking powder, in mind, so they need a particular amount of moisture and weight to rise properly. Since tahini is more like a fat than a liquid, the most logical place to substitute it is with butter.

If you’re an inexperienced baker, your best bet is to look for a recipe that already accounts for the proportions of tahini to butter in a cookie recipe. This way, you won’t have the trouble of mixing a whole batch of cookies to get disappointing results. If you’re a confident baker, you can try adding tahini to an existing chocolate chip cookie recipe by swapping it for some of the butter. Many recipes replace up to half or more of the butter in a cookie recipe with tahini, but if you want to see how things taste before fully committing, you can substitute the butter one-for-one for a few tablespoons. tahini soup. If you’re really not sure you like the combination, try spreading a little tahini on a baked cookie and taking a test bite, just like spreading peanut butter on a brownie.

Tahini Troubleshooting

Chocolate chip cookie recipes are pretty heavy duty, so if you stick to the one to tahini to butter ratio, your cookies should be a pretty normal shape and texture. That said, there are some things to watch out for.

Most importantly, be sure to use high-quality tahini that tastes great when you eat it straight from its container. Lower quality tahini is less expensive and you can use it for other recipes where it is more of a background component, but sharp, pungent tahini will appear front and center in a baked cookie. Also, don’t use salty varieties (check the label carefully), as your cookies will likely become unbearably salty. If you’re not happy with store-bought options, you can easily make your own tahini.

Also, tahini is not solid at room temperature like butter, so be sure to refrigerate the dough for at least two hours before baking the cookies so the fat has a chance to solidify. This will prevent your cookies from coming out very flat and the insides will be moist and soft. Once you get your first taste of your salty-yet-sweet Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies, you’ll never bake a regular batch without tahini again.

Read the original article on Daily Meal.