Saltines Are The Chocolate Chip Cookie Topping You Never Knew You Needed

If you're someone who loves the combination of salty and sweet, you need to try adding this unexpected ingredient to your chocolate chip cookies: saltines. You may be surprised or confused — after, we don't exactly associate crackers with cookies. However, there's a reason that there are so many cookie recipes out there that incorporate salt, whether it's a salted caramel recipe or simply sea salt sprinkled on top. With that in mind, saltines are an easy way to achieve that saltiness while also adding an extra crunch thanks to the nature of the cracker. Plus, you probably already have a box of them in your pantry.

To use saltines as a topping, start by making your favorite chocolate chip recipe as normal. Then, crush the saltines — you want to make it so that the pieces are quite small but not so small that they become crumbs — and add the saltine pieces into the dough at the end as you add in the chocolate chips. 

The only caveat to this combination is that the saltines lose their crunch and get a little soggy after a day or two, so you may want to only add the saltines to half the recipe — or halve the recipe in general — so you get to indulge in the tasty sweet-salty combination without worrying about leaving behind soggy leftovers.

After you've tried and loved adding saltines to a batch of chocolate chip cookies, you'll probably wonder if you can use the crackers to add saltiness to other types of cookies — and the answer is yes. It's no surprise that salt and chocolate work beautifully together — which is part of the reason that we love the saltines on chocolate chip cookies specifically — so you may want to start with chocolate-centric cookie recipes.

For example, you can whip up a batch of chewy chocolate gingersnap cookies with an infusion of crushed saltines for a saltier version of the chocolate-forward cookies. Or, you could turn to fleur de sel cookies, which are rich chocolate cookies that already call for salt as a topping, proving that these were meant to have that salty-sweet combo at the forefront — just make sure to replace the salt called for with the saltines to avoid overdoing it on the salt.

But you don't have to stick to just chocolate cookie recipes. You could try adding saltines to traditional snickerdoodle cookies, which are full of sweetness thanks to both the sugar and the cinnamon, so the saltiness from the saltines will give these cookies a nice balance. Or, you can try adding saltines to cowboy cookies — which are oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with shredded coconut and pecans — to add one extra element to these already complex cookies.