Name: Chewy Vegan Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 12 min
Total time: 2 h 32 min
Yield: 16 cookies
Cuisine: American
Ingredients: 190g vegan block butter (not a spread); 225g light brown soft sugar; 85g caster sugar; 90ml unsweetened soy milk, or oat milk; 2 tsp vanilla extract; 340g plain flour; 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda; 1 tsp fine sea salt; 225g dairy-free dark chocolate, roughly chopped (check the label); Flaky sea salt, for the tops

Method

7 steps

Make the dough

Melt the vegan block butter in a saucepan over low heat, then leave it until barely warm. Too hot and it melts the sugar into a greasy dough.
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Whisk both sugars into the melted vegan butter, then the soy milk and vanilla. Whisk for a good minute until it looks glossy and slightly thickened.
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Fold in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and fine salt until only a few dry streaks remain, then fold in the chopped chocolate. Stop as soon as it comes together.
Cover and refrigerate for at least two hours, or overnight. The dough should be firm enough to roll without sticking to your hands.

Bake

Heat the oven to 180C fan. Roll the cold dough into balls slightly larger than a golf ball and space them well apart on lined trays — six per tray, no more.
Bake until the edges are set and golden but the centres still look distinctly underdone and puffy.
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Scatter with flaky salt and leave on the tray for ten minutes. They finish cooking in the residual heat and settle into the right texture. Moving them early is how you get a raw middle.
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Equipment

Two lined baking trays
Digital kitchen scales

Notes from testing

Brown sugar and a splash of soy milk hold the dough together and keep the middle chewy without any eggs.

Do not skip the chill. Vegan block butter is softer than dairy butter, so warm dough spreads into thin, greasy discs. Chopping a bar rather than using chips gives molten seams of chocolate rather than isolated dots, and baking the cookies slightly under and letting them set on the tray gives the fudgy centre.