Walnuts Deserve A Spot In Your Cookies, But There's An Extra Step You Should Take To Make Them Stand Out

Nut lovers are probably well aware that much of the population thinks that walnuts, cashews, and almonds don't belong in baked goods. We get it: If done wrong, nuts can cause flavor and textural clashes. But we're here to change your mind about baking with nuts; specifically, the walnut. Of all the recipes to make with walnuts, cookies might not be on your radar. Samantha Merritt, creator of Sugar Spun Run, a baking website known for reliable, from-scratch recipes, gave us her number one tip for breathing life back into walnut cookies.

"While raw walnuts can taste a bit flat (or even a tad bitter)," she explains, "roasting them helps bring out their natural, nutty, toasty flavors that can better complement baked goods (and are more appealing to your taste buds)." Luckily, roasting nuts at home is so simple it can be done while you're preparing your cookie dough. To roast walnuts in the oven, simply preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake them until they begin to brown; this should only take around 7 minutes.

If you don't want to go the roasting route, Merritt also recommends getting walnuts nice and toasty on the stovetop. "Toasting also helps to crisp them slightly, which usually adds a nice appealing texture to the baked good they're added to," she says. This method is even quicker. Simply heat up a skillet to medium-high heat, add your walnuts in an even layer, and stir them around until they're fragrant and have begun to brown.

Toasting walnuts isn't the only way to improve your nutty cookies. While you could go the extra mile for better-tasting nuts and fry them, you mainly want to make sure you're combining walnuts with the ideal flavor profiles. If your toasty walnuts clash with the cookie itself, you'll have done that extra step for nothing. "Some complementary flavors that work really well with toasted walnuts include vanilla, brown butter, honey, and cinnamon or nutmeg," Merritt explains. "They also work amazingly well with banana."

Our banana cookie recipe would surely agree. To add them to this recipe, you'll want to fold in your toasted walnuts at the same time as the chocolate chips, just like we do in our copycat Levain chocolate chip walnut cookie recipe. If any of the walnuts are oversized, you can certainly chop them coarsely to ensure more of a consistent texture. This can also help ensure that your cookies don't crumble.

It goes without saying that walnuts also pair excellently with chocolate, and there's no better place to let these two ingredients mingle than in a cookie. Take our brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe to the next level by adding crisp, toasty walnuts, for instance. Brown butter gives any cookie a deeper, more toffee-like flavor, and walnuts give them that delicious crunch and nuttiness so good, you'll never omit them again.