Thursday, June 5, 2014

Chocolate Chip Bacon Fat Cookies

Ever since I started cooking all the food to freeze, I've been sort of on a roll cooking different comfort foods. I bought rice flour pasta and made macaroni and cheese with jalapenos in my homemade cheese sauce. And then I made a homemade bolognese sauce for rice flour spaghetti. Finally I invented a cookie recipe. Chocolate chip bacon fat cookies! Sounds disgusting, but it's not!

During my freezer cooking thing, I saved all my bacon drippings. I had at least a solid cup of bacon fat leftover. I enjoy cooking with bacon fat for certain foods, eggs and hashbrowns, toasting nuts in it, adding it to vegetables ect, but I don't use much of it at a time and I don't use it nearly as often as other fats and oils because the flavour is strong by comparison.

I started doing some research on what I could do with all this fat and I came across a traditional cookie recipe that I thought I might be able to convert to grain free. I've done a lot of experimenting with grain free baking in the last year, which included a lot of failed recipes thrown in the trash, so I wasn't sure if my made up recipe was going to work, but it actually did!. If you want to check out the original recipe, visit Something Swanky. It's quite different from mine, but that's where the inspiration came from.

Ingredients:
  • 1/2 cup cold bacon fat
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 cup pitted prunes
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 2 cups paleo flour (4 parts coconut flour, 4 parts almond flour, 1 part tapioca flour and 1 part arrowroot flour)
  • 1 cup milk chocolate chips
In a food processor, I mixed the first 5 ingredients together, then added the baking soda once the batter was smooth and kept it running till it mixed in. The batter did not smell sweet like cookie dough usually does, it smelled like warm bacon fat and I was worried it would taste too salty and briefly contemplated adding agave or something else to sweeten it, but I carried on. I dumped my batter into a bowl and added the paleo flour and then folded in the chocolate chips. I ended up mixing it by hand because it was easier.

On a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper I shaped a tablespoon of dough into a ball and flattened it a bit. Once the tray was full, I put it in the freezer to chill while I worked on the next tray. I didn't want my cookies to freeze, but once it had chilled for 10-15 minutes and the fat was cold, I popped it in the oven for 9 minutes at 375 degrees F. This recipe yeilded 2 dozen small cookies. Don't try to make a dozen large cookies, they won't turn out. Trust, me I've learned the hard way with past recipes lol.

I was so nervous while they were baking, but when I opened the oven and pulled out these delicious smelling cookies I knew everything was right in the world. Straight from the oven, the chocolate was gooey and the cookie was smokey and soft. In fact, it was chewier than I expected. I thought it would be more crumbly and cake like since grain free baking has that effect, but it was just as a cookie should be. Must be all that fat!

I left them on the cooling racks over night and in the morning put them in a ziplock bag and put them in the fridge. After lunch I grabbed a cold cookie, wondering if they would taste different, but they were still fantastic! They were so smooth and velvety, like it melted in my mouth. I think I like them better cold than I did warm!

I'm so excited to go to Costco and buy more bulk bacon so I can fry it all up and make these cookies again! Oh, and eat more bacon of course.

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