Black & White Chunk Cookies

Two kinds of chocolate in every cookie. Semi-sweet and white chocolate get chopped into chunks (not chips) and folded into a brown sugar butter dough with walnuts or pecans. The dark and white chocolate chunks melt at different rates, creating pockets of bittersweet and creamy sweetness throughout each cookie.

The dough uses both butter and butter-flavored shortening in equal amounts. Butter adds flavor. Shortening adds structure and keeps the cookies from spreading too flat. Together they produce a cookie that’s crispy on the edges and chewy in the center.

Cream the sugars and fats until truly light and fluffy before adding the egg and vanilla. This step aerates the dough and determines the final texture. Under-creaming makes dense, flat cookies.

Drop by tablespoonfuls and space them 2 inches apart. These spread during baking, and crowded cookies meld into one giant sheet.

Kitchen Tips

• Use chocolate bars chopped into irregular chunks, not uniform chips. The uneven sizes mean some pieces melt completely while others hold their shape, creating a better texture contrast.
• Pull them at light golden brown, not dark. They firm up as they cool on the sheet, and even one extra minute in the oven turns chewy cookies into crunchy ones.
• Cool on the cookie sheet for 1 minute before transferring. Moving them too soon and they break apart. Leaving them too long and they stick.
• Store in an airtight container. The dual fats keep these soft for 3 to 4 days.

Variations

• Triple chocolate: Add 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder to the flour for a chocolate dough with both chocolate chunks.
• Sea salt finish: Sprinkle flaky sea salt over the cookies right after they come out of the oven.
• Macadamia swap: Replace the walnuts with chopped macadamia nuts and use only white chocolate chunks for a tropical-leaning cookie.