Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

I was inspired by a couple of different websites to purchase this book last weekend.  Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce.  The book is centered around recipes using different types of whole grain flours.  It's a beautifully put together book, with gorgeous pictures of most of the recipes included.  I did do a little investigating prior to buying to make sure that the flours used are indeed available to most normal grocery store shoppers, and yes indeedy they are.  I found most if not all of them in the organic section of my favorite grocery store. 

This was the first thing that I made.  They were calling out for me to make them as soon as I flipped to their page.....


Now let me tell you, I have tried recipes centered around whole wheat flour before, and was not impressed by the overall texture, or the flavor of whatever it was I had baked at the time.  So I will say that initially, I had my doubts about whether these cookies were going to be an all-out showstopper or not.



All suspicions were put to rest after one bite of these babies.  They held their shape nicely in the oven without turning into flat, lifeless blobs.  Big plus in my book.

They were delightfully chewy, and I thought the distinct prescence and flavor of the brown sugar was heaven.


Add to that the chocolate that oozed out of them, and it doesn't get much better.  They would rank pretty darn high on my list of favorite chocolate chip cookies..... if I had a list of favorite chocolate chip cookies.... They can, without a doubt, hold their own against any white flour recipe out there, and I think there's definitely something to be said for that.



Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies
Recipe adapted from Kim Boyce and Good to the Grain

Dry Ingredients:
3 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

Wet Ingredients:
8 oz (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cold and diced into 1/2 inch cubes
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

4 oz bittersweet chocolate (1 Giardhelli bar), roughly chopped
4 oz semisweet chocolate (1 Giardehlli bar), roughly chopped


Preheat oven to 350 degrees and get your cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and ready to roll.

Combine flour, salt and baking soda in a bowl. 

In your stand mixer, combine cold cubed butter and both sugars until blended.  About 2 minutes.  Scraping down the bowl with a spatula as you go, add the eggs, one at a time and blend until just combined.  Add the vanilla and mix to combine.  Gradually add the flour mixture in 2 to 3 batches, blending well after each addition.  Finally, add the chocolate pieces and blend until evenly distributed throughout.  The cookie dough will resemble rough, wet, sand.

Whereas I normally put cookie dough into the refrigerator to avoid lifeless blobs on the cookie sheet upon removal from the oven, with this particular recipe, that was not really necessary.  I did put it into the refrigerator between batches, but I found that the cooler the dough was, the harder it was to get the dough to stay together.  This is a very dry mix.  It will come together in your fingers when pressed, but for all intents and purposes will look like a big bowl of rough sand.  Take note.....you're going to have to mold it fairly firmly in order to get cookie mounds and not piles of crumbs on your cookie sheet.

Scoop the cookie dough with whatever your desired scooping tool is, onto the baking sheet in even mounds.  I used my 1 tablespoon sized cookie scoop, and pressed the dough firmly into the scoop before releasing the dough onto the cookie sheet, and it worked fairly well.  Bake the cookies for 15 to 20 minutes, until evenly brown.  How do you tell when brown cookie dough is evenly brown???  I checked the bottoms of a couple cookies before calling the batch done.  After baking a couple of batches, you'll get the time down perfect, and won't need to check for done-ness.   This recipe makes enough cookies to feed an army by the way.

Cool and eat....... or eat when they come out, but be careful and don't burn the top of your mouth and tongue like I did.  They were delicious.  You'll want to eat them as soon as they come out of the oven.  Trust me.