I got on the sourdough train in January 2020 before the pandemic, and I always hated throwing the discard away, but since I was new to sourdough, I didn’t realize that there was another option. Amidst the pandemic and the resulting flour shortage in March/April, my hate for wasting food increased, and I vowed to never throw away my sourdough discard again! Thus, I came up with the recipe for these sourdough discard chocolate chip cookies.
I tweaked my standard chocolate chip cookie recipe to include the sourdough discard, and the result was that these sourdough discard chocolate chip cookies don’t taste at all sour, but have a nice cakey texture to them.
Ingredients:
- ½ cup salted butter, room temperature
- 1/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
- ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 flax egg (1 tablespoon ground flax seeds mixed with 3 tablespoons water until it gels)
- 1/3 cup sourdough discard
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- ½ cup chocolate chips or chopped chocolate (I use semi-sweet or dark, but you can use any type of chocolate you like)
This recipe makes 24 cookies when using a 1.25 inch cookie scoop.
Start by creaming the butter, salt, both sugars, and vanilla together in a large bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer until the mixture is fluffy. Next, add in the flax egg and mix to combine. Add in the sourdough discard and mix until it is just incorporated and evenly distributed. You don’t want to overmix or the cookies will get tough from the excess gluten development.
Next, mix together the flour and baking soda in a separate bowl, and add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in two batches, mixing in between each addition until all of the dry ingredients are moistened. Finally, add in the chocolate and mix to evenly distribute it throughout the batter.
Scoop about 2 teaspoons of batter per cookie (I use a 1.25 inch cookie scoop so each cookie is the same size) onto a cookie sheet lined with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper. Don’t worry about spacing the cookies far apart because you are going to freeze the dough, so just try to get all of the cookies on one sheet pan so that you can easily fit it into the freezer.
Once you have scooped out all of your cookies, place the sheet pan in the freezer for at least two hours until the dough is frozen. At this point, you can bake as many of the cookies as you want, and keep as many as you’d like in the freezer for future use. I usually store half of the cookies in a silicone zip top bag in the freezer, and bake the other half immediately.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
Once the oven is up to temp, place the frozen cookie dough mounds on a baking sheet with about 1.5-2 inches of space in between each cookie. Bake the sourdough discard chocolate chip cookies for 9-10 minutes. With my traditional chocolate chip cookies, I only bake them for 8 minutes, but because of the active yeast and bacterial cultures in the sourdough discard, it’s best to bake the cookies for a bit longer. The goal is to get them slightly golden on the outside, but keep them soft and chewy on the inside.
When the cookies are done, remove them from the oven then let them cool for about 10 minutes on the cookie sheet before transferring them to a wire cooling rack. Enjoy!