The Best Chewy Egg-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Welcome to Flawed yet Functional! My name is Emily, and I manage my Type 1 Diabetes with a Paleo minus eggs diet (having used the Autoimmune Protocol to discover my food sensitivities). Desserts are not a high priority in my household, but everyone needs a sweet treat every now and then! I recently began experimenting with cookies to satiate my family’s sweet tooth. I’m excited to report that I may have figured some things out! Check out these delicious egg-free chocolate chip cookies!

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The Secret to Egg-free and Dairy-free Cookies

As I mentioned above, I am following the Paleo Diet without eggs. That means that each recipe I make is gluten-free, grain-free, dairy-free, and due to my egg sensitivity, egg-free. As you can imagine, baking with all of these restrictions can be limiting. How do you make chocolate chip cookies without eggs or milk that actually taste good?

The secret to chewy cookies is using nut or seed butter and a combination of gluten-free flours to achieve the right sticky dough consistency. Eggs do create awesome rise and texture in baked goods, so every Paleo-friendly recipe I’ve created does lack a bit of volume or fluff to it. As a result, these cookies are a bit denser than your typical chocolate chip cookie. However, they are super tasty, and they are very chewy. Yum!

How to Bind Baked Goods Without Eggs

Not only do eggs create a fluffy texture to baked goods, but they also help to bind ingredients together. Egg-free baked goods have a tendency to be crumbly and not stick together like their egg-filled counterparts. So how do you make a chocolate chip cookie without eggs that still holds together nicely?

The key to these cookies sticking together is a nut or seed butter combined with flaxseed eggs. I have not found flaxseed, chia seed or gelatin eggs to be a great one-to-one substitute for eggs. However, when combined with the stickiness of nut butter, they bind baked goods together quite well.

For this recipe, I liked the flavor and consistency of tahini best (This is not the tahini I used, but it’s a great price!). Just in case you didn’t know, tahini is ground up sesame seeds. So jumping back to your high school SAT analogy problems: sesame seeds are to tahini like peanuts are to peanut butter. Make sense? Check out the options and substitution section below to see what other types of nut or seed butters would work in this recipe, but don’t feel bad about experimenting with what you have in your pantry!

Dairy-Free Chocolate Chips

Chocolate is acceptable on the Paleo diet, and is a reintroduction in the AIP diet. However, it is difficult to find chocolate without dairy in it. Obviously, any milk chocolate has dairy, but the bigger problem I have is finding chocolate that has not been processed on the same equipment as chocolate that contains milk. Yes, it seems crazy, but I am that sensitive to dairy.

The best tasting and best-priced brand I have available here in West Michigan is Enjoy Life chocolate chips. The dark chocolate is my favorite and the one I buy the most. My kids prefer semi-sweet chocolate chunks or mini chips.

I have tried the Pascha Brand chocolate chips as well, and I do enjoy those too. They are not available all the time at my local supermarket. So I don’t rely on that brand.

Options and Substitutions

It seems like every paleo recipe needs an options and substitutions section. Actually, it’s not unique to Paleo recipes, is it? We all want to see if we can make do with what we have on hand! Let’s check out what you could use instead of the listed ingredients for these egg-free chocolate chip cookies.

Nut or Seed Butter

I have tested this recipe with tahini and SunButter. Both taste great, but the oil content is very different in each so some adjustments must be made when substituting a butter other than tahini.

Tahini is very runny because it is very oily. When using tahini, follow the recipe as written. However, if you choose to substitute SunButter, or likely any other nut butter, add 2 tablespoons of melted coconut oil to the batter when you add the nut/seed butter. The SunButter I tried was the consistency of peanut butter. See the picture below for the consistency of my tahini. It is much runnier.

I’m sure this recipe would work with almond butter or cashew butter. Just add additional melted coconut oil at least two tablespoons maybe three for cashew butter so the batter is not too dry.

Gluten-Free Flours

I experimented with arrowroot powder and tapioca starch in this recipe, but I think they lend a gummy texture which is hard to bake out of the dough. I would only recommend the almond flour (this is the almond flour I use) and coconut flour combination that is written in the recipe because they bake well together and make the right consistency of dough.

In a pinch, you could substitute arrowroot powder for the coconut flour, but I would not get rid of the almond flour base.

As with most of my recipes, I shy away from using arrowroot powder as the primary flour because it is very high in carbohydrates. Almond flour and coconut flour are a much more diabetic-friendly, lower carb version. You’ll find them often in my recipes. They are also very common and you can find them readily at a lower price point than the other gluten-free flours.

Egg Substitutes

While I did not test them, I imagine gelatin eggs or chia seed eggs would work just as well as the flaxseed eggs. Follow the links above to get ratios for making those types of egg replacements.

Just like with my egg-free pancakes, where there’s a will, there’s a way! If you are really looking for a sweet treat, no matter your diet restrictions, you can make it happen! Try these egg-free chocolate chip cookies the next time you or your kids need a delicious, Paleo, egg-free treat!

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