Other people, like Sun, love chocolate but prefer it free of its dough prison. “You don’t need it in a cookie,” he tells me. “It’s that simple.” For me, it’s about texture: a firm hunk out of nowhere is disorienting. And for voice coach Tiara Aracama, it’s about sweetness. A self-proclaimed savory tooth, overly saccharine foods “make me wince,” she says.
Shilpa Uskokovic, my colleague and senior test kitchen editor, says, “I’ve been assaulted by many a chocolate chip cookie—too much chocolate, too bitter, too sweet, too subpar.” So she developed a chipless cookie of her own. Her recipe isn’t the celebration of excess we’ve come to associate with its choc chip forebears—it’s one of self-determination.
Traditional chocolate chip cookies are tiny monuments to a more-is-more philosophy. The rich, buttery base is not enough—it’s a mere canvas for chocolate. Bakeries everywhere, such as Levain and Crumbl, with their almost equal ratio of dough to chips, seem to be asking themselves: Structurally, how much chocolate can this cookie take?
Chipless cookies have no chips to hide behind—the chocolate is “almost a crutch, a cheap thrill,” says Shilpa. She wanted to make sure each component in her chipless recipe pulled its weight. Her challenge became coaxing the most flavor from the three loudest ingredients: butter, sugar, and flour. There’s browned butter with its super toasty milk solids. Not light but dark brown sugar with its molasses intensity. “And, in perhaps the most unusual move, I ended up toasting a portion of the flour in the butter until it was latte brown,” Shilpa says. “It caramelizes the proteins in the flour and boosts the malty, roasty smells and flavors.”
After trying one in the office, test kitchen editor Kendra Vaculin felt seen. “I am that rare (but maybe not so rare, we’re learning) freak who prefers her cookies without chocolate,” she says. “Shilpa’s recipe is a ‘plain’ cookie that’s anything but; it’s butterscotchy from the toasted flour and browned butter, fragrant with vanilla, and perfectly crisp-chewy.”
To be clear: This is not just a sugar cookie, a critique many chipless lovers face in a chips-forward world. “A sugar cookie is all white sugar,” says Fennel, who runs the Broma Bakery blog. “And a higher ratio of flour, so it’s more dense and doesn’t have the same chewiness as a chocolate chip cookie.”
You also can’t just omit the chips from a chocolate chip cookie recipe, as many believe. “The cookies spread differently, rise, and crackle differently, and most of all, taste like one giant apology,” Shilpa says. “Like, ‘Umm, I ran out of chocolate, sorry.’” Shilpa’s interpretation is both skillful and delightful and just a little bit obsessive. “I lost count after 11 recipe trials,” Shilpa says of her process.
As often happens in the face of a dominant culture, underdogs must stick together. The chipless seemingly have a safe place on Reddit. “So glad to have found like minded individuals here,” one user wrote in the Chocolate Chipless Cookies Lovers Group, a subreddit of 218 members. Another empathized, “People look at you like you’re crazy when [you] unveil your taboo kink.”
If chocolate chip people are maximalists, then who are the chipless? The world might tell us we hate joy, but “there’s something really beautiful about the simplicity,” says Balingit, the cookbook author, of chipless cookies. “I love that what you see is what you get.” Despite the condescension we face, I found no bitterness amongst my fellow chipless lovers. “The chocolate chip cookie was refined and perfected to the extent that we could go in and take out the worst parts of it,” says Sun, the author and illustrator. “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”
