It’s cold outside.

I made some ordinary chocolate chip cookies at Christmas time as a gift for someone. I hadn’t made them for quite a while and they were good. Very good. I had forgotten how good homemade chocolate chip cookies really are. And since I gave these all away I didn’t get much more than a taste. Of course, being me, I can’t just make more and eat them. I have to do something different. I also committed myself, as a sort of New Year’s resolution, to trying some of the ancient grains and heritage grains that I’ve been investigating. The commingling of these two ideas is simple. I went looking for chocolate chip recipes that used different kinds of flour.

King Arthur flour has a recipe for Rye Chocolate Chip Cookies. Compared to the recipe on the back of several brands of chocolate chips the rye cookie uses less sugar, less butter, less egg, and more flour. I’m really very curious about this, and since I bought rye flour to try making brown bread I have it on hand for this experiment. https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/rye-chocolate-chip-cookies-recipe

Next I found a recipe that uses two cups of spelt flour (in a plain chocolate chip cookie there’s usually 2 1/4 cups of plain white flour) and even less sugar and butter than King Arthur uses for the Rye cookies. Hmmm. Not sure how I feel about that. https://www.grainmillwagon.com/spelt-chocolate-chip-cookies/

Another spelt recipe calls for half spelt and half wheat flour plus an egg and an egg yolk. In a long life I have never figured out what you are supposed to do with the egg white if you only use the egg yolk. I’m thinking I won’t try that recipe.*

https://bluebirdgrainfarms.com/the-perfect-einkorn-chocolate-chip-cookie/ This recipe calls for browning the butter. It uses that extra egg yoke, and it says that the recipe will work much better if you refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes. It’s not really for spelt but for einkorn which probably isn’t the same cooking-wise but it came up when I asked for cookies with spelt flour. Bluebird grains is a mill; it has another recipe… https://bluebirdgrainfarms.com/emmer-chocolate-chip-cookies/ This recipe calls for emmer flour and is otherwise indistinguishable from the recipe on the back of many packages of chocolate chips. Very interesting. Bluebird sells all three flours, einkorn, emmer, and spelt.

Emmer flour is fairly close to modern flour, slightly younger than einkorn, older than spelt. I think this means that I can try spelt in that straightforward recipe as well. Okay, further hunting on the internet produces a “spelt chocolate chip cookie” recipe that is nearly identical to the recipe on the back of packages of chocolate chips. It uses a quarter cup more spelt. Of course, finding things on the internet doesn’t mean they are real AT ALL. I believe the Bluebird recipes and King Arthur flour recipes have at least been tried out because those places have a reputation to lose.

The Bluebird Grain farm also has a recipe for Cowboy Chocolate Chip Cookies which seems to mean — rye and whole wheat flour, plus oatmeal, a little less sugar and a lot less chocolate.

One more! https://thegourmandiseschool.com/single-best-cookie-ever-flour/ This recipe has more butter, two complete eggs, two different kinds of chips, two different kinds of sugar (and more of it while we are noticing), three cups of any whole grain flour and a cup of hazelnuts. I don’t really like nuts in my chocolate chip cookies, even though I love hazelnuts in general.

I feel that it is my duty to try these different cookie recipes and discover which is the best before Valentine’s Day.

I don’t want to order fancy flour* and then fail to use it because I got intimidated by recipes that call for making a levain, if I want to use those flours in sourdough bread, for example. I’ve killed a bunch of sourdough starter this fall and my daughter-in-law has had to rescue me. So for bread I’m going to start by substituting spelt or Sonoran flour for a portion of the regular white flour and use the sourdough recipe in my head. Depending on how the cookie tests go, I might wish I had simply substituted a small portion of flour in them as well.

When I’ve got some cookie taste tests done, I might try ancient grain biscuits, sourdough or regular. When it’s cold outside might as well be warm inside.

*Yes, I did buy some spelt flour. I don’t know when it will arrive…