Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chewy on the inside and slightly crispy on the outside, these chocolate chips cookies are sure to disappear quickly!

Mar 30, 2022

Today’s recipe ingredient tweak has to do with reducing the amount of saturated fat in cookie recipes. Consuming excess saturated fat (found in fatty cuts of meat, full-fat dairy products, lard, and butter) can raise LDL (bad) cholesterol levels. A high LDL level is one risk factor for heart disease. Replacing some of the saturated fat in our diet with healthier, unsaturated fat (found in olive oil, corn oil, canola oil, vegetable oil, avocados, nuts, and seeds) can help lower heart disease risk.

I was able to reduce the amount of saturated fat in these chocolate chip cookies by using two ingredients in place of stick butter – a butter and oil blend and reduced-fat cream cheese.

A butter and oil blend is often called spreadable butter. As the name implies, it’s a mixture of butter and oil. Butter and oil blends usually contain about half the saturated fat as regular stick butter. Land O’ Lakes and Challenge are two popular brands. I also found a really good brand of spreadable butter at Aldi’s called Countryside Creamery. The addition of reduced-fat cream cheese gives the cookie some structure and, tablespoon for tablespoon, reduced-fat cream cheese has less saturated fat and fewer calories than butter.

If you skipped this butter replacement tweak and just used stick butter (1/2 cup) in today’s recipe, each cookie would have 4 grams of saturated fat, instead of 2 grams. While 4 grams may not seem like much, healthy adults should keep their saturated fat intake to no more than 20 grams a day. Your daily saturated fat budget would take quite a hit just munching on a few butter-only chocolate chip cookies.

Now that we’ve got the “nutrition stuff” out of the way, let me wrap things up and tell you why I added milk and corn starch to this recipe. These two ingredients affect the texture of the cookie. Adding milk to the batter produces a softer cookie. Adding cornstarch creates a softer cookie as well, but it also helps the cookie form a crisp, slightly crunchy exterior. If that’s your preferred cookie texture, give these two ingredients a try.

To your health,

Darlene

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Yield: 28 servings

Serving Size: 1 cookie

Prep: 15 minutes

Ready: 30 minutes

INGREDIENTS

Parchment paper or vegetable oil cooking spray (such as Pam)
1/4 cup spreadable butter and oil blend (such as Challenge Spreadable Butter)
1/4 cup (2 ounces) reduced-fat cream cheese
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 tablespoons 1% milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup white whole-wheat flour
1 tablespoon corn starch
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or coat with cooking spray; set aside.
In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, cream together butter and oil blend, cream cheese, brown sugar, and granulated sugar. Add the egg, milk, and vanilla extract and mix to combine.
In a separate bowl, combine all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, corn starch, baking soda, and salt. Add dry ingredients to creamed ingredients and mix well. Stir in chocolate chips and pecans.
Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls onto prepared baking sheets, yielding 28 cookies. Bake 10 to 12 minutes, or until edges begin to brown. Cool on wire racks.

Cook’s Note: For consistent cookie size, I used a 3/4-ounce scoop (also labeled #40) filled with cookie dough and leveled.

Nutrition Information per cookie

142 Calories, 6 g Total fat, 2 g Saturated fat, 0 g Trans fat, 10 mg Cholesterol, 57 mg Sodium, 22 g Total carbohydrate, 1 g Dietary fiber, 15 g Total sugars, 15 g Added sugars, 2 g Protein, 0 mcg (0%) Vitamin D, 10 mg (0%) Calcium, 0 mg (0%) Iron, 56 mg (2%) Potassium