This is the best recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies you will ever find. Soft, chewy, and melt in your mouth delicious, they are everything you could ever want in a chocolate chip cookie recipe!
The Best Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies
No flaxmeal
No chia seeds or egg replacer
Just 9 ingredients
No chickpeas
This is my tried-and-true best vegan chocolate chip cookies recipe that both vegans AND meat eaters love. Try the recipe out on all your friends.
How is it possible that these secretly vegan cookies taste so much like regular traditional chocolate chip cookies? It’s because the cookies are made with ONLY traditional chocolate chip cookie ingredients!
You may also like these Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies
Homemade chocolate chip cookies have been one of my favorite desserts for as long as I can remember.
Give me a choice, and I’ll choose chocolate chip cookies over cake or candy any day of the week. Even before I was tall enough to see above the kitchen table, I earned the nickname Cookie Monster.
Any time there were cookies around, I would be sure to find them.
So it makes sense that, upon going vegan, they were one of the very first recipes I veganized, along with these Vegan Pancakes and Vegan Cinnamon Rolls.
No one who tries the recipe can ever believe these soft and classic chocolate chip cookies are actually vegan!
Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookie Ingredients
The one bowl recipe is easy to make using basic ingredients, with no almond flour or applesauce, and no coconut oil required.
For the flour: Try the cookies with spelt flour, oat flour, or regular white all purpose flour. I have not tried using whole wheat flour so can’t vouch for that substitution. Be sure to leave a comment with results if you do try.
The fat source: Options that work include sunflower, coconut, or vegetable oil. Or sub a full fat vegan butter spread such as Melt Organic, Miyoko’s, or Earth Balance.
For the sweetener: Feel free to experiment with different types of sugar or sugar free alternatives such as xylitol or granulated erythritol.
You can also just use all of one type of sugar instead of two. The resulting cookies might be crunchy or spread more, or they might need more or less time in the oven, but edible baking experiments are the best kind of experiments!
*For keto chocolate chip cookies, try these Keto Cookies
Is Chocolate Vegan?
And are chocolate chips vegan? I’m asked these questions quite often, and thankfully the answer is that yes, chocolate itself is vegan.
While milk is sometimes added, there are many brands—even some generic grocery store brands—of vegan chocolate chips and chocolate bars that are becoming much easier to find.
If you want to seek out vegan chocolate chips at a regular grocery store, the best place to start is the natural food aisle. Most regular grocery stores should have a natural food section. Just ask an employee if you’re not sure where it’s located.
Look for one of the following brands: Enjoy Life, Simple Truth Organic, Target Simply Balanced, Lily’s Sweet Stevia Sweetened, Kirkland semi sweet (Costco brand), Guittard semi sweet or extra dark, Equal Exchange, Scharffen Berger dark chocolate baking chunks, Trader Joe’s semi sweet, Sprouts semi sweet, or Pascha.
(Note: Some of these packages say “may contain milk” on the label because the chocolate chips are made in a facility where non-vegan products are also produced.
Most vegans still consider such products to be vegan, but of course it’s a personal choice, especially if the reason to avoid milk is due to an allergy. At press time, Enjoy Life and Pascha brands are certified dairy free, gluten free, and soy free.)
Where Can I Buy Vegan Chocolate?
As mentioned above, you can find vegan chocolate chips at many regular grocery stores. Other good places to look include Whole Foods, local health food stores, Amazon, or iHerb.
Sometimes online stores will offer a lower price. If nothing else, you can always chop up a chocolate bar to make your own chocolate chips!
There are too many vegan chocolate bar options to list them all here, but some of my favorite fair-trade options include Theo, Pacari, Taza, Loving Earth, and Endangered Species brands. And there are so many more.
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How To Make Chocolate Chip Cookies
Gather all of the cookie ingredients as well as a medium mixing bowl.
Combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and chocolate chips in the bowl. Stir well.
Add the nondairy milk, oil, and pure vanilla extract. Stir to form a cookie dough. It will be dry at first, so just keep stirring and it will suddenly turn into cookie dough.
Press the dough into one big ball. Refrigerate at least two hours or overnight, or freeze until the dough is cold.
Once chilled, preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Roll chocolate chip cookie dough balls, and place the balls on a greased cookie tray. Leave enough room between cookies for spreading when they bake.
Cook for eleven minutes on the oven’s center rack. The cookies will look underdone when you remove them from the oven. This is what you want, because they continue to firm up considerably as they cool.
Let the chocolate chip cookies cool for at least ten minutes. If for some reason the cookies don’t spread enough (climate sometimes interferes), simply press down with a spoon after baking.
Storage And Baking Tricks
- If you’d like to freeze the cookie dough to have on hand whenever a chocolate chip cookie craving hits, roll into balls and freeze in an airtight container for up to three months. When ready to bake, there’s no need to thaw the cookie dough first. Just add an additional 1-2 minutes to the cooking time.
- For soft chocolate chip cookies, store leftovers in an airtight plastic container, and add about 1/4 slice of bread if you have one, which helps keep the cookies soft. For crispier cookies, store in a glass container. Baked cookies will last for 2-3 days.
- I’ve made these cookies so many times, and climate can definitely affect the shape and texture of the results. But despite not always looking the same, each batch has always tasted ridiculously delicious. I’ve never made a bad batch yet.
- The vegan chocolate chip cookies are great for lunchboxes or parties where someone else is hosting and you need a portable vegan dessert that you can take from point A to B without a mess.
- Over one hundred more dairy free and plant based vegan cookie recipes can be found by visiting the following page: Healthy Cookies Recipes
Above, watch the vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe video
The recipe was adapted from these Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup white, oat, or spelt flour
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup sugar, unrefined if desired (For no sugar, try these Breakfast Cookies)
- 1/4 cup brown sugar or coconut sugar
- 1/3 cup chocolate chips
- 2 tbsp milk of choice, plus more if needed
- 2 tbsp oil or melted vegan butter
- 1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
Instructions
- Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl, then stir in wet to form a dough – it will be dry at first, so keep stirring until a cookie-dough texture is achieved. If needed, add 1-2 tbsp extra milk of choice. Form into one big ball, then either refrigerate at least 2 hours or freeze until the dough is cold. Once dough is chilled, preheat oven to 325 F. Form dough balls, and place on a greased baking tray, leaving enough room between cookies for them to spread. Bake 11 minutes on the center rack. They’ll look underdone when you take them out. Let them cool on the baking tray 10 minutes before touching, during which time they will firm up. If for whatever reason the cookies don't spread enough (climate can play a huge role), just press down with a spoon after baking. You can also choose to make extra cookie dough balls and freeze them to bake at a later date. I can only vouch for the flours listed, but feel free to experiment!View Nutrition Facts
Video
Notes
Vegan Dessert Recipes
Hi Katir,
First of all thank you for posting this vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe! I’m grateful to find such a recipe without having to add peanut butter since one of my kiddos has an aversion to anything peanut butter. Go figure! Anyway, I’m going to replace the oil with apple sauce to make them oil free and see how it goes. By the way, said kiddos are in their 20’s ? and still request vegan homemade chocolate chip cookies for Christmas!
How did this go?
Does this recipe actually work with that tiny amount of wet ingredients? I had to add 1/3 cup of apple sauce (that’s a lot!) to mine to make it into a dough and it was still a little on the dry side. Otherwise they looked more like piles of sand on the baking sheet. Turned out good with the added apple sauce.
Thanks for the great recipe !
I Will Make this recipe at home I really love Chocolate Chip Cookie rich chocolate flavor with a nice balance of the cardamom.
I make my cookies on a round pizza pan for my grandson. He is not a cake eater so we decorate the cookie with icing and Happy Birthday. 🙂
This is my second time making vegan chocolate chip cookies and I am a horrible baker. This recipe did not turn out for me. They are hard as rocks and do not taste good. I didn’t add white sugar so that may have something to do with the taste, but this is the second time I’ve made rock cookies. Why do they not melt and become soft and gooey?
Do you mean that you omitted the white sugar completely, or replaced it with something else? Also, what sugar, flour, and oil did you use?
Can you just use all brown sugar in place of the refined sugar, using 1/2 cup brown sugar for the recipe instead?
I made these yesterday. They are delicious
The only thing is, they were very soft after 7 minutes of baking and about 15 minutes cooling.
Not sure what happened???
Thank you ?
Any ideas on how to bake this as one large cookie ? (Like a pizza sized cookie for a kids party)
Thanks!
This is a reallly old recipe on her site, but it’s one of my favorites!
https://lett-trim.today/2011/09/12/giant-cookie-cake-a-healthy-recipe-makeover/%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Deep dish version: https://lett-trim.today/2011/05/31/deep-dish-cookie-pie/%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Just made these…fantastic! My kids ate half of the batter before it even made it into the oven. And I was too impatient to refrigerate the dough, so I baked the room temp dough for 10 mins and it came out great.
I’m very critical of vegan cookies, as in I can only recall one amazing vegan cookie in my life (and there is a large sample size!) but this is the best recipe out there. Thank you for enriching my life!
I’ve made vegan chocolate chip cookies before but decided to try these. I am not sure why they are more complicated than others. I have never needed to chill a recipe other than sugar cookies. Also having them come out not looking baked was strange as well. They tasted good because they are filled with sugar and chocolate but I don’t think I’ll make them again.
The site says my photo is too big but I made these and they were the bomb.com!! Thanks for the recepie!!!
Aw sorry about that! We are not sure why it would say that but put in a help request with Katie’s web developer. So glad they turned out well, and thank you for making the cookies! Jason (media relations)
Great recipe!
For reference for anyone who wondered about similar things to me:
I followed this recipe almost exactly, except I used (vegan) chocolate buttons cut in half instead of chocolate chips as I didn’t have any – and I added about 20g extra of them because yum!
I let it sit around 25 mins in the freezer.
I made 11 cookies.
🙂
Vegan chocolate buttons sound amazing even just on their own! Googling!
Hi Katie,
I was inspired to use your recipe to make cookie dough frozen yogurt. I took your recipe, halved it, and blended it with approximately 1 cup of greek yogurt–any variety will do. I also left out the chocolate chips because I don’t like frozen chocolate chips. I’ve done this a few times with different cookie dough recipes, and I think the results are truly great! I wanted to recommend it. Kindly,
Lauren
Oh wow, these are perfect! I made these for family members with egg and gluten allergies and everyone loved them. We aren’t vegan, so next time I may try melted butter instead of oil.
Does anyone know if I can use this recipe to make a giant cookie? And how to adjust the cooking temperature/time?
I can not explain how greatful I am to finally be able to eat sweets again!! I have a allergy to bananas and so many vegan recipes contain bananas as some substitute for something else. So thank you thank you soo much!