Elevate Your Regular Chocolate Chip Cookies With Sourdough

In the aftermath of the bread-baking craze that swept home kitchens during the lockdown, it's not uncommon to receive a little jar of sourdough starter discard as a gift. If you're not interested in turning out loaves at home and miss the good old days when a housewarming present consisted of flowers and wine (and not the word "discard"), don't re-gift that wild yeast just yet. Instead, consider using it in your next batch of chocolate chip cookies. 

Rest assured that adding a bit of sourdough starter to your cookie batter will not leave you with a bread-cookie hybrid, nor will it cause your cookies to rise significantly. Rather, thanks to its high water content, the sticky fermented substance will lend your cookies an irresistibly soft and chewy texture that won't dry out as quickly as other homemade treats. Perhaps best of all, playing around with the different amounts of starter in your cookies isn't likely to ruin your batch — unlike adding the wrong amount of flour or salt.

There's no need to stray from your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe to introduce a sourdough starter to the mix. Simply add some discard to your wet ingredients (i.e. your egg and vanilla) and proceed as usual. For a chocolate chip cookies recipe that yields around two dozen of the iconic baked goods, aim for around a cup of starter. You'll also wanted to be extra careful to knead your dough gently for the most decadent texture.

Over on Reddit, where one user described sourdough cookies as "perfectly chewy in the center and [not] quite as sugary as a typical chocolate chip cookie," some bakers seem to be experimenting with how much starter they put in. "I was only able to use about 200 [grams] sourdough starter discard, but the flavor of these cookies is still out of this world," one user attested. The forgiving nature of the ingredient is something to keep in mind for bakers who prefer to veer from the book. 

Once you master the perfect sourdough chocolate chip cookie, you might find yourself wanting to add starter discard to all sorts of other bakes. Great news: You absolutely can. A Reddit wiki page dedicated to sourdough discard includes recipes for everything from apple fritters to buttery biscuits to chocolate cake. 

Pastry chef Caroline Schiff of NYC's Gage & Tollner provides further proof of the ingredient's versatility. Her cookbook "The Sweet Side of Sourdough" includes a version of chocolate chip cookies, but it also features 49 other recipes to repurpose both starter discard and ripe starter — including lemon-poppy-cream-cheese babka, peach and ricotta focaccia, carmelized-grapefruit and brown sugar cake muffins, and blood orange and hazelnut crumb cake.

Just like its function in the humble chocolate chip cookie, sourdough starter adds depth of flavor and balances the sweetness of all kinds of desserts. And when you're fresh out of ideas, you can always add a dollop or two to your pancake batter. Toss in a handful of chocolate chips and it's the next best thing to a cookie.