Beer Is The Unexpected Ingredient For Richer Chocolate Cookies

Have you ever tried infusing your chocolate cookies with booze? Not just any type of alcohol will produce tasty results, but stout beer can give your desserts the rich flavor upgrade you've been craving. Stout beer is a dark brown, deeply complex variety with flavors of sweet roast malt, a little bitterness, and often notes of coffee, chocolate, and hazelnut. You may even find a little umami flavor from the yeast, which slightly balances out its sweetness.

Stouts are ideal for mixing into your chocolate cookie dough since the beer's slight bitterness can help balance out the overarching sweetness in these baked goods. Besides adding all those complex flavor notes, stouts can also turn your cookies into heartier desserts and will work perfectly with any mix-ins you may decide to add. And because the drinks tend to have a thick, creamy texture, they may even result in cookies with a chewier consistency.

Almost any stout beer can enhance the flavor of your chocolate cookies, but you have a few varieties to choose from. The most famous brand may be Guinness, whose dry stout is largely sweet, creamy, and bitter, with notes of fruitiness. A splash of this beer would work well with some added fruit in your cookies, such as dried cranberries, raisins, and cherries. 

If you love java, you could also stir in some coffee grounds or crushed beans into chocolate dough paired with a coffee stout or add extra chocolate chips into dough infused with a chocolate stout. But feel free to get creative here — how delicious do chopped cherries sound mixed into a chocolate stout-laden cookie dough? 

To try out this method, start out by stirring two tablespoons of room temperature beer into your dough, right at the end of mixing your wet ingredients but before you combine them with the dry ones. As an alternative, you can make a reduction of a full bottle of stout with brown sugar on the stove, then add it to your wet ingredients at the same step — although you'll need to make adjustments to the recipe since you're adding in all that extra liquid. But the latter will concentrate the flavors in your beer even more, so they'll show up stronger in the cookies. 

The choice is ultimately yours, but either option will add a deeply complex flavor to your rich chocolate desserts.