Best Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies: Crispy, Chewy, and Irresistibly Delicious!

Everyone loves a chocolate chip cookie! You may think making a vegan version is impossible, but that’s not true. Making a batch of crispy, chewy, and irresistibly delicious vegan chocolate chip cookies is easy with just a few ingredients.

To home-bake the best vegan chocolate chip cookies, you must find a reliable brand with no milk. Luckily, most grocery stores have them in the natural foods section. If you cannot find vegan chocolate chips, use a bar of vegan dark chocolate broken into smaller pieces. Since the pieces will break into uneven sizes, you can expect a delicious result with varying textures and tastes in the cookies.

Flour is another essential for chocolate chip cookies. Since flour is vegan, you only have to decide what flour you prefer. All-purpose flour works best, but you may prefer spelt or oat flour as a substitute.

The sweetener you use for your chocolate chip cookies also depends on your preferences. Therefore, you can use brown sugar, coconut sugar, or a sugar-free alternative.

Several egg substitutes are available for vegan chocolate chip cookies. Apple sauce works well, but you can also substitute a well-mashed banana.

Finally, when choosing a fat, you also have several choices. Vegetable oils and vegan butter spread, including coconut oil, will do. However, refined coconut oil is neutral enough if you prefer not to have a coconut flavor.

Easy Vegan Cookie Recipes

When looking for an easy recipe to make the best vegan coconut chip cookies, you will want a quick one that contains readily available ingredients and ensures you hardly mess up your kitchen.

Here’s a recipe for The Best Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies from It Doesn’t Taste Like Chicken that uses only one bowl and ten everyday ingredients.

The recipe’s surprise ingredient is apple cider vinegar, but its creator says you won’t taste it at all, and she’s right. Vinegar causes a chemical reaction, giving the cookies that extra chewiness.

Remember that vegan chocolate chip cookie dough should be soft but not sticky. Use non-dairy milk to soften the dough if it’s too firm, or add some flour to a dough that is too sticky. Add one tablespoon at a time, whether you need more liquid or flour, until the dough has the right texture.

Prepare the vegan chocolate cookie dough beforehand if you know you’ll be busy when you want to bake the cookies. Prepare the dough, wrap it well, and keep it in the refrigerator for up to three days before baking. However, if you want to prepare it further in advance, it’s best to freeze the cookie dough in a brick or divided portions, ready to bake. You don’t need to defrost the dough for frozen cookies in divided portions before baking. Add about 2 minutes to their cooking time.

Best Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Baking the best vegan chocolate cookies does not require excellent baking skills. Here is a recipe for a vegan chocolate chip cookie that’s crispy on the outside and perfectly chewy on the inside.

The recipe calls for a slightly higher oven temperature to achieve the crispiness. Using a large cookie scoop creates giant cookies that will retain their chewiness. The recipe yields 16 cookies, but you can make them smaller. Smaller cookies will require a shorter baking time of about 2 minutes.

What makes these particular vegan chocolate chip cookies so unique is the extra dose of chocolate chips pressed into them as soon as they come out of the oven. It’s optional, but you can also add some flaky sea salt.

Best Vegan Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients

• ½ cup coconut oil: it must be solid but just enough to make it scoopable
• 1 and ¼ cups light brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• ¼ cup coconut milk (the thicker Thai variety works well, but so will any other)
• ¼ cup unsweetened applesauce or mashed banana
• 2 and 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 t. baking soda
• ½ t. salt
• 2 cups vegan chocolate chips (1 ¾ cup for the mixture and the rest for when they come out of the oven)
• Flaky sea salt is optional

Instructions

• Line your baking sheet with parchment while waiting for the oven to preheat to 375 degrees (F).
• Whisk the coconut oil, brown sugar, and vanilla in a large bowl until well combined.
• Add the applesauce and coconut milk. Whisk some more until all the ingredients are combined.
• Mix the dry ingredients in another bowl.
• Throw the combined dry ingredients into the wet mixture, stirring it with a wooden spoon until well combined.
• Fold in the first chocolate chips (1 ¾ cup).
• Use a large cookie scoop to place pieces of the dough onto your prepared baking tray. If you don’t have such a large cookie scoop, use about 3 T. of mixture for each cookie. Allow a few inches of space between each cookie for spreading.
• Bake for about 9 – 10 minutes. The edges of the cookie will look golden, and the center will feel set to the touch.
• Remove the tray with the baked cookies from the oven and press the remaining vegan chocolate pieces into the tops of the warm cookies. Sprinkle them with flaky sea salt while they are still warm.
• First, allow the cookies to cool on the baking sheet for about 15 minutes before laying them on a cooling rack for the rest of their cooling time.

Note: When making vegan chocolate chip cookies, don’t flatten them in the pan before baking them. Leave the balls nicely rounded for the best results. If they are still coming out too flat, vegan fat may be the cause. Add 1- 2 T of flour to the cookie dough mixture or chill it before baking.

How to Make Vegan Cookies

You don’t need eggs or butter to bake the best vegan chocolate chip cookies or any of your favorite cookies. Here is a collection of recipes from Love and Lemons for various cookies, including Vegan Gingerbread Cookies, Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies, Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies, and Apple Oatmeal Cookies.

The trick to turning any recipe vegan is understanding how to substitute animal-based ingredients with the best vegan options. Here are some tips:

Eggs

As you have seen from the above recipes, you can substitute eggs in cookies with applesauce or mashed banana. Another way is to replace each egg with one tablespoon of flax meal mixed into three tablespoons of water. Allow to sit for at least five minutes to form an egg-like gelatinous mixture. You can also use chia seeds for their added fiber and omega 3s. However, cornstarch will also work if you have none of these ingredients to replace eggs. Mix one tablespoon with two tablespoons of water to substitute one egg.

Butter

If the recipe requires solid butter, then a solid form of coconut oil is best. If it requires melted butter, you can melt the coconut butter and replace it in equal amounts.

Chocolate

There are several dairy-free chocolate options for recipes, whether for the batter or as a drizzle. Not all dark chocolates are vegan, but if you have found a great one, you can also break the bar into pieces for baking.

Sugar

Many vegans do not use white sugar because of the use of bone char in its purification process. Therefore, if a recipe calls for white sugar, you may want to replace it. You can replace white sugar in recipes with unbleached cane sugar, brown sugar (which works well in cookies), coconut sugar, or any other sweetener you prefer. If you prefer to use a wet sweetener like maple syrup, molasses, or ripe bananas, you must slightly increase the flour in the recipe to ensure the same crispy result.

Milk and Yogurt

Most recipes for cookies call for milk or yogurt. However, it’s easy to adapt a recipe to your vegan diet since several non-dairy substitutes exist. Replace equal amounts of plant-based milk like almond, rice, soy, or oat milk for the recipe. The same applies to substituting yogurt. However, plant-based yogurt tends to be runnier than Greek yogurt, so add a bit less or more flour to your cookie mixture to ensure you have the right consistency.

Vegan Cookie Recipes Made Simple

Traditional cookies require dairy butter, eggs, milk, yogurt, and other ingredients, like flour, baking powder, and vanilla. If you want to make chocolate chip cookies, you also need chocolate. When making the best vegan chocolate chip cookies, you must replace traditional ingredients with plant-based substitutes, including vegan chocolate.

Cookie baking is great because you can prepare in advance. Either store uncooked cookie dough in your freezer or refrigerator until you want to bake it, or store baked cookies in airtight containers. Baked cookies will keep well for up to three days.

Even though vegan cookies replace animal proteins with healthier plant-based options, remember they are still not wholly healthy since they contain sugar. However, indulging in a treat is fine when eaten in moderation.