So.

Many.

Cookies.

Needless to say, it was hands down the best day of culinary school so far.

Our class spent all day today working on conversions- changing recipes from their original refined sugar-laden, butter-filled form into health-supportive vegan treats. And let me tell you, while I’ve had success in veganizing baked goods or making them healthy, attempting both is not easy. I feel like we could spend a whole week on this and still not come up with perfect replicas!

The rules: no white sugar, no butter, no eggs, no vegan “substitutes” like Ener-G or Earth Balance. Just real, whole foods. Substitute one ingredient at a time, in ascending order of difficulty.

In order to break up the class from our usual groups, Chef Elliot divided us into pairs at random. The funny thing was that everyone somehow seemed to end up with the same person they always work with. My groupmates were Sarah and Liz (there’s an uneven number, so a threesome was needed), and I dubbed us the Kid’s Club because we’re the three youngest in the class.

The recipes were doled out by lottery. We got to go second and chose the ever-popular Toll House chocolate-chip cookies, (modified to yield a smaller batch). 

For the first batch, we followed the recipe to a tee and noted that the finished product was soft and chewy, with a heavily sweet chocolate flavor from the semisweet chocolate chips.

In batch #2, we subbed half the unbleached all-purpose flour (the original called for 1 cup + 3 tablespoons of white flour) with 1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon whole-wheat pastry flour.  These tasted super similar to the original, but were slightly less chewy and a little crisper around the edges. We weren’t sure whether it was a cook time thing or a flour thing, since the ovens can get temperamental.

For batch #3, we switched the semisweet Callebaut chocolate chips with Sunspire grain-sweetened ones. We hoped that these would make the cookie less sweet…

But it actually only made them taste bland and slightly bitter Apparently the chocolate goodness of regular chocolate chips adds a lot to a plain old chocolate chip cookie. The other difference we noted was that these came out fluffier than the others, probably due to the fact that we folded in the chips instead of using the stand mixer.

Batch #4 was the first major substitution. We replaced the 6 tablespoons each of white and brown sugars with 6 tablespoons of rapadura, 6 tablespoons of coconut sugar and 1 tablespoon of maple crystals.

By removing the brown sugar we knew we were removing the acid activator for the baking soda, but we hoped that there would still be enough molasses in the Rapadura to make it work. The dough turned out amazingly light and fluffy, so we had high hopes for these.

Wrong. Unfortunately, while these cookies were perfect to taste, the texture and appearance was way off. They had a complex, slightly caramel flavor, but they were pancake-flat and super bendable…so clearly, the baking soda didn’t work. Fail.

In batch #5, we subbed the stick of butter for 7 tablespoons of canola oil, then made the switch to baking powder. The dough had the consistency of Elmer’s glue, so we expected them to run…

But amazingly, they puffed up into an almost cake=like shape. Cake-like is actually probably the best way to describe these cookies; they had the fluffy, texture and undersweetened taste of yellow cake. Not the best for a cookie.

By batch #6, it was time for our last substitution: egg. I feel like egg is the hardest because there’s no vegan food that matches its properties and texture. We used a flax egg, made by combining 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed meal with 3 tablespoons of water. We also upped the maple crystal content to 2 tablespoons for more flavor. We popped them in the oven and waited.

And waited, and waited, and waited. For some reason, these took about three times as long to cook as the other batches- thirty minutes or so. The wait was well worth it, though, because with the exception of the bitter chocolate chips, these were freakin’ awesome. Soft and chewy, probably the closest to the original.

Since we had a few extra minutes, we quickly whipped up another batch, reverting to the regular chocolate chips and subbing two tablespoons of canola oil for two tablespoons of walnut oil to see how it affected the flavor. The batter became a little thick, so we added two tablespoons of water as well to compensate.

These were just as good as batch #6, but completely different in texture. It blew me away how much the simple change of walnut oil for canola changed the appearance of these cookies!

Our final tasting tray:

In case you’re wondering, baking for six hours straight is both wonderful and exhausting. There were six groups, each preparing a different treat, and each time a new batch came out of the oven they were up for tasting. That adds up to…a lot of tasting.I pride myself on my sugar-eating abilities, but this was a marathon of sweetness. Chef Elliot made us all a miso soup to balance the sugar between bites:

The fun part was that I felt like I was learning the whole time. I’ve read and made lots of vegan recipes, but I’ve never really gained an understanding of why some things work and other’s don’t.

By playing with sugars and oils and flours, we became familiar with the recipe and what would turn out well, instead of just throwing a bunch of stuff in a bowl and hoping for the best.

Plus, I was lucky that Liz and Sarah love baking, too. We were all crazy excited about each recipe, which made it really fun. Don’t do drugs (or eat copious amounts of sugar) alone!

As far as the other groups, there were oatmeal-raisin cookies, which had a ton of variation from batch to batch. This group was really adventurous and used things like molasses and applesauce.

Black-and-white cookies, which Chef said was probably the hardest recipe of them all. Their finished product had a little bit of almond meal and was really good!

Peanut butter cookies by the dozen. I liked almost every version of these. Peanut butter is hard to mess up, which is probably why it’s such a mainstay of vegan baking!

Brownies, some of which came out great and others of which came out pretty badly. This group had a huge challenge in that they had to replace sweetened cocoa powder with unsweetened- not an easy feat, especially when you can’t just add more white sugar to compensate. Their version made with zucchini and olive oil was surprisingly fabulous!

Carrot cake. This group definitely tried the widest variety of options, ranging from coconut oil to date and palm sugar to sweet potatoes and applesauce. I enjoyed most of them, and it was neat to see the huge variation in taste and appearance.

For the record, though, what this made me realize more than anything is that from a taste perspective, the real deal with butter and sugar is almost always the way to go. Even if you do have to worry about salmonella when you’re licking the spoon. Now, who wants leftovers?