Passover Chocolate Chip Cookies

Baking cookies for Passover used to mean settling for something dry and crumbly that resembled a cookie in shape only. Not anymore. This recipe nails the chewy chocolate chip cookie everyone wants, just without the wheat flour. The flour swap uses three Passover-friendly starches working together: matzo meal for body, cake meal (a finely ground matzo meal) for tender structure, and potato starch for the chewy bite that gluten usually delivers. Each one does a different job. Skip any of them and the cookies turn either tough or sandy. The 1.5 cups of brown sugar to ½ cup white sugar ratio is intentional. The molasses in brown sugar keeps these cookies soft for days, while the white sugar gives the edges that satisfying crisp bite. The dough rest is non-negotiable. Chilling for at least an hour lets the starches fully hydrate, which is what prevents the cookies from spreading into thin, crispy pancakes in the oven.

Pro Tips

• Make sure all ingredients are certified kosher for Passover if you’re baking for the holiday.
• Don’t skip the dough chill. Warm dough spreads too thin and bakes into wafer cookies instead of soft and chewy.
• Use parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. These cookies stick badly to bare baking sheets.
• Pull from the oven when the edges are set but the centers still look slightly underbaked. They firm up as they cool.
• The 10 to 15 minute rest on the parchment after baking is essential. Move them too soon and they fall apart.

Variations

• Add a teaspoon of cinnamon and ¼ teaspoon of nutmeg for spiced holiday cookies.
• Substitute chopped walnuts, pecans, or chopped almonds for half the chocolate chips.
• Use dark chocolate or chocolate chunks instead of chips for richer pockets of melted chocolate.