This Chocolate Cookie Is So Dark It's Practically Unsweetened

For people who really love chocolate—people who have done the hard work of making chocolate a daily part of their lives—it can sometimes be hard to get enough. Chocolate is like caffeine, exercise, cigarettes, and crossword apps: the more you partake, the harder it becomes to feel satiated. You have to change things up to get the same endorphin rush, the same energy boost. Often that change is simply partakingeven more.

For chocolate people,partakingmorecan mean simplyeatingmore. But it can also mean taking in more cacao (or, put another way, eating darker chocolate). An advanced chocolate fiend will be much more satiated by a 70 percent chocolate, which will vibrate with the cacao bean’s complex makeup of fruity, spicy, bitter flavors, than a 50 percent chocolate that has been cut with more sugar and milk.

Of course, you could also do both things: eat darker chocolate, and more of it. If that’s the tack you’re taking, meet Joanne Chang’sDouble-Chocolate Rye Cookie.

It’s not the use of two chocolates that makes this cookie distinct. It's not even the rye flour (though that helps). It’s the fact that one of the chocolates in this cookie is dark to the extreme: it’s 100 percent unsweetened.

Unsweetened chocolate is typical in brownies and cakes, where it is melted and mixed with sugar and butter. But folding chunks (small chunks, butstill) of unsweetened chocolate into a cookie is something that is almost never done. Chang, the chef and owner of Boston’s Flour Bakery and the author ofPastry Love, does it because, she says, “so often chocolate is sweetened to the point that you focus as much on thesweetnessas you do on theflavor.”

Using unsweetened chocolate eliminates that risk. “The unsweetened chocolate lets you focus on theflavorof the chocolate. Which, depending on the chocolate you use, could be fruity, could be smoky, could be tart.”

It’s a trick that Chang says you can use with any cookie. But if you do want to add a little unsweetened chocolate to, say, yourfavorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, Chang has this advice: “Don’t shave it too thin. Keep it somewhat rough, so you get pockets of the unsweetened chocolate, as opposed to having it melt into the batter.”

This brings us to the question of what unsweetened chocolate does to a cookie. Does it make the cookie savory? Won’t the cookie taste too bitter? The answer is no and no. There’s enough sugar (and sweetened chocolate) in this cookie to keep it firmly in the dessert department. But that deep, spicy, tart chocolate note does make an impact. For years, Chang has watched her customers eat the cookies and wonder why these chocolate cookies taste somehow better than all others.

“You don’t really know what it is that’s making the cookie taste the way it does,” she admits. “But you enjoy the cookie. You keep eating it.” That compulsion to keep eating will be familiar to chocolate fiends. But at the end of this cookie, they may finally, for once, feel satisfied.

Double Chocolate Rye Cookies

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