salty buckwheat chocolate chunk cookies.

I’m not the kind of person that can take a handful of ingredients and just whip up something spectacular but if you give me a recipe, I can follow that recipe to a T. I think that’s why I enjoy baking so much – it’s precise and very much dependent on following directions. Not to mention, you always end up with something fabulous to eat!

I enjoy reading cooking magazines and watching cooking shows (Barefoot Contessa is the best!) and reading all the things on all the foodie websites. One of the magazines and websites I like is Bon Appétit, especially their site Basically. Basically has recipes and cooking techniques for all levels of foodies. So when I saw that they were conducting a 10-week, 10-recipe series to help you become a better and more confident baker, I signed up. Each week I will get an email with a different recipe to help me become a better baker.

The first week’s recipe was for Salty Buckwheat Chocolate Chunk cookies.

Some thoughts on this recipe:

• My first thought was what is buckwheat flour? I had to look this up on the internet and discovered that buckwheat flour is flour ground from buckwheat. Buckwheat is not related to wheat – it is a plant related to rhubarb and sorrel. It is naturally gluten-free.
• My regular grocery store did not have buckwheat flour so I made a special trip to Whole Foods to get this elusive ingredient. I also picked up kosher salt while I was there as I did not have this in my cupboard and also couldn’t find it at my grocery store. I can only hope that future recipes will ask for these ingredients otherwise I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.
• The cookie dough was an odd color. It was speckled and almost gray-like from the buckwheat flour. It did not look like the cookie dough I am used to seeing.
• I’ve never chilled chocolate chip cookie dough before. I’ve chilled cookie dough that you have to roll out and cut, but never cookie dough that you just drop onto the cookie sheet. You did have to roll these cookies in a ball which was easy to do when the dough was chilled.
• These cookies spread so much! The recipe says they will spread but I was a bit skeptical until I pulled them out of the oven. They spread a lot!
• That being said, these cookies are huge. Now, I am not a fan of big cookies. I prefer to be able to eat my cookies in 2-3 bites. So I like a smaller cookie, These cookies are not small.
• These cookies also do not smell good when cooking. You know how when you’re at the mall and you walk by Mrs. Fields and how yummy it smells? These cookies did not smell like that. Again, I think it was because of the buckwheat flour, but the cookies did not smell very appetizing.
• I thought the cookies tasted okay. I’m not a consumer of dark chocolate (I prefer milk chocolate chip cookies) so that messed up the taste for me. Again, I know I keep coming back to this but the buckwheat flour – not great.

Final thoughts:

Would I make these cookies again? Probably not, especially if I have to go again to the specialty store to get buckwheat flour. I know a lot of people like the nutty flavor of the buckwheat but I didn’t care so much for the taste here. In the future, I’ll just stick to my Toll House chocolate chip cookies that I make using the recipe on the back of the chocolate chips bag.

Q: What is your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe?