Copenhagen Rye Cookies with Chocolate, Spice and Seeds | Baking with Dorie

There are several specialty flours I keep in my pantry: semolina for pasta, 00 for pizza and rye for bread and cookies. Why rye flour?

The answer is simple: rye has this complex, robust and nutritious flavor which I like in my bread. Besides, the gluten content of rye flour is generally lower than that of wheat flour. I just need to recycle among the list of recipes which use rye. There are quite a few of them.

Top of the list is the Mokonut’s rye-cranberry chocolate chunk cookies, an all-time favorite for my family. I won’t spill all the details on these cookies, except that they are 60% rye. You need to make and taste them to believe in their superlative quality. I’ve found the Copenhagen rye cookies with chocolate, spice and seeds to be another great one. It uses less rye (20% of total flour), and has a unique spicy (espresso coffee, cardamon, cinnamon) and seedy (sunflower, flax, sesame) bite to it with a more crispy texture.

I made a bag of these Copenhagen rye cookies for the shuttle bus driver who takes me to the ski lodge almost daily. In turn, he shared the cookies with his best customers and buddies and raved about them. Wait until he tries the all-time-family-favorite rye cookies!

How do the Copenhagen rye cookies compare to the classic chocolate-chip cookies besides the rye flour?

The methodology: It’s the same approach as making the classic cookie dough. Start with creaming butter and sugar in a stand mixer. Gradually add eggs and the dry ingredients until you get a uniform dough. With the mixer off, incorporate the chopped chocolate. Then give the mixer a few spins on low to finish pulling the dought together. Do the same with the seeds. In short, there is no deviation in terms of methodology from the classic cookie dough.

A basic chocolate cookies recipe generally consists of fat, sugar and flour in equal parts in weight. You need two sticks of butter to make 40 cookies, according to the Copenhagen rye recipe.

The ratio: The amount of butter gives me pause; I can’t help it. However, as compared to the combination of the two flours (298g): 238g of all-purpose and 60g of rye flour, butter is only 76% of the total flour in weight. Okay, the amount of butter is not an issue. Furthermore, given that the butter content is high enough, these cookies spread quite a bit. Now, consider the two sugars (300g): half granulated and and half brown sugar. They are at par with the amount of flour. The relatively high ratio of sugar is what gives us the crispy texture of the Copenhagen rye cookies.