Buckwheat Tahini Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Last time I ordered chocolate Soom, it came with a recipe for double chocolate chunk tahini cookies. (On a side note, looking up the link to this recipe online led me down a rabbit hole of other delicious-looking recipes that I’ve been sure to bookmark!) I didn’t make them quite as they were intended, I guess, because I got 20 cookies (as opposed to their 36 to 48, which is still a whole lot of variation!), so I’m assuming mine were bigger and chewier than they were meant to be, but that’s what I like! 

In any event, they were good enough, though I felt like I wanted something with chocolate chunks, sure, but no chocolate in the dough. The tahini, however, was a welcome addition. It’s possible the seed had been planted when I had read this a few years ago.

A quick look through my bookmarks revealed these tahini and rye chocolate chip cookies and, while they looked delicious, I didn’t want to add a bag of rye flour to my pantry. I wondered if I could just replace it with buckwheat and still get something good. When I saw that someone had replaced the wheat with buckwheat, I decided to adapt the recipe my way, replacing the rye flour with light buckwheat flour that I thought would work better than the typical dark one.

So without further ado, here’s my recipe for buckwheat tahini chocolate chunk cookies! They were delicious, and they were all so good-looking that it was hard to choose just one to photograph. I used a 3-ounce cookie scoop to shape them and got a total of 16 cookies.

125 g light buckwheat flour (see link above)

125 g white whole wheat flour

1 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. salt

½ cup (1 stick) lactose-free butter or margarine, at room temperature

¼ cup tahini

1 cup light brown sugar

1 large egg

1 large egg yolk

1 tsp. vanilla extract

8 oz. bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped

sesame seeds, to coat

In a medium bowl, whisk together the buckwheat flour, wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

Place the butter, tahini and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer and beat until light and fluffy. Add the egg, egg yolk, and vanilla and beat until combined. Add the dry ingredients and mix until combined, then add the chocolate and mix until evenly distributed. Scoop the dough into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 4 hours until firm. (You can also refrigerate the dough for up to a few days.)

Preheat the oven to 360 °F (the higher-than-normal temperature helps “set” the cookies before they spread too much). Line a baking sheet with a silpat or parchment paper.

Using a 3-oz cookie scoop, form the cookies. You can either place them on the prepared baking sheet and sprinkle them with sesame seeds like I did, or roll them in sesame seeds for a more thorough coating and then place them on the sheet (up to 12 to a sheet is fine).

Bake for 10 minutes or so (my oven is on the hot side, so it may take up to a few more minutes for you), until the cookies are ever-so-slightly golden at the edges (they will still look damp on top). Allow to cool completely before attempting to pick them up.