Vegan Levain Style Cookies

The thicc bois have entered the group chat. And you all know I am in LOVE with monster cookies. And these guys take the CAKE! They are my fully vegan levain remakes, and they are almost foolproof.

I have another (non-vegan) Levain cookie recipe, but that takes a little more technicality and skill, whereas this recipe I can just throw together and boom: Levain cookie. And that’s all because of one magic ingredient: vegetable shortening!

Ok now before you go demonizing our girl shortening, let’s just all take a deep breath and remember life is short and cookies are good and all foods are good foods ok? Ok. I promise one of these cookies won’t kill you! We’re just using a different kind of fat source in a different way.

Now onto vegetable shortening and what it does for this cookie: You can get height in a cooke a lot of different ways, the most common is to use a lot of flour, but this creates a chalky, cakey cookie that doesn’t have the moist, gooey center that you want. But with vegetable shortening, you can still get the height in your cookie without sacrificing any of that great texture from the fat.

This is because of a few factors – vegetable shortening has a higher melt point than butter, meaning that it needs to be in the oven longer before it gets to that spread point that butter has. You know when you put a tall cookie dough mound in the oven and you check back and it’s a puddle? That almost never happens when using vegetable shortening. The shortening helps the cookies maintain their height while they bake throughout, making a moist, gooey, tall and tender cookie. Just like the ones at Levain!

But are there other perks to vegetable shortening? Hell yes. It makes an incredibly tender cookie texture, almost a melt-in-your mouth feel.

This is because vegetable shortening is 100% fat, while butter is only about 80% fat, with the rest being moisture. The moisture in butter interacts with the proteins in your flour, causing gluten formation. This forms a chewier cookie, but without that formation, you get a softer, more tender crumb. Plus I add a bit of cornstarch in this recipe to get an even softer baked good – it doesn’t sound like much but you’ll notice the difference!

You might be wondering – with all the perks of shortening, are there any negatives? And the answer is like with every ingredient, you gain some things and you lose others. And when you use vegetable shortening, you do lose that signature butter-taste. Butter lends a certain richness to baking, but that doesn’t mean we can use a few other tricks to restore that rich flavor. What I like to do is add a higher amount of salt than normal to bring out the flavors of the cookie, as well as only use brown sugar, which has rich molasses flavors that help add another depth of flavor to the cookie.

I promise after making those two tweaks, you won’t miss any butter flavor notes at all!

This recipe does use a stand mixer, you can find a link to the one I have here.

Vegan Levain Chocolate Chip Cookies

The thicc bois have entered the group chat. This vegan cookie recipe only makes 6 but they are SO worth it. Full credit for their ~chonkiness~ goes to one of the most underrated fat sources: vegetable shortening! It creates a thicker, taller cookie while still keeping moisture and tenderness, a total win-win for anyone plant-based!

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Prep Time:15 minutes mins

Cook Time:20 minutes mins

Ingredients

• 135 g all-purpose flour about 1 cup & 2 tbsp
• 2 tbsp cornstarch
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ⅛ tsp salt
• ½ cup vegetable shortening room temp
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 tbsp almond milk
• ½ tsp vanilla extract
• ¾ cup chocolate chunks

Instructions

• Preheat your oven to 400F.
• Cream the shortening and sugar together for a few minutes, then add the almond milk and vanilla.
• Cream again while you whisk together the dry ingredients in a separate bowl.
• Fold the dry ingredients in with the wet then add your chocolate chips.
• Separate into 6 cookies, weighing about 75g (smaller) to 120g (closer to Levain size!)each.
• Pile them up tall, almost like little cylinders and bake at 400F for 12-13 minutes or until they are golden brown!