Upgrade Store-Bought Cookie Dough With Your Favorite Savory Mix-Ins

Store-bought cookie dough is a convenient and efficient way to enjoy your favorite cookies without mixing, chopping, or dirtying your kitchen. While premade cookie dough will bake into perfectly edible cookies, you can easily upgrade store-bought cookies by adding savory mix-ins.

Sweet and savory is a longstanding and award-winning taste duo in cuisines around the world because they're complementary flavors that mutually enhance each other while achieving a well-balanced profile. Plus, the savory taste encompasses a spectrum of notes, including nutty, funky, herbal, earthy, and cheesy. While some savory mix-ins are better suited than others to incorporate into a sweet cookie, the breadth of options allows you plenty of creative culinary freedom.

Household staples are waiting to be artfully repurposed into savory mix-ins whether they're crunchy pantry snacks, dried herbs, canned vegetables, or pastes. The cookie dough brands will do the heavy lifting by supplying you with a tasty foundation. However, savory mix-ins will add a novel and creative touch, effectively transforming store-bought dough into a unique, personalized cookie.

Store-bought cookie dough brands abound, and many of them offer all your favorite cookie flavors, from chocolate chip to Snickerdoodle. Any flavor will benefit from a savory mix-in. The most obvious and conventional add-ins are nuts. And you can upgrade a simple chocolate chip cookie dough with a sprinkling of chopped, toasted pecans or almonds. Another delicious pairing for chocolate chip cookies or double chocolate cookie dough would be earthy, salty potato chips. Their earthy flavor would temper the sweetness of the cookie, while the added salt would enhance the chocolate flavor.

Meanwhile, pumpkin spice cookie dough would taste delicious with the addition of toasted pepitas. Or if you're making a peanut butter cookie, chopped pretzels would add a fun crunch as well as a savory twist to the richness of the peanut butter. Drawing inspiration from the latest haute cuisine trends, you could add funky, tangy miso paste to peanut butter dough for a sophisticated upgrade. Tahini is another rich, savory paste that would add depth of flavor to many types of cookie dough.

Sugar cookies are another veritable blank slate for add-ins. Their intense buttery sweetness would pair well with a mixture of corn kernels and bits of mellow white cheese. You could also use herbs like rosemary or thyme with parmesan or even olives to create the ultimate earthy and umami snacks.