If you love soft cookies, you’ll love our recipe for soft gluten free chocolate chip cookies! These are made without dairy or eggs, and they are also made without rice flour or xanthan gum as well. But they are easy to make and have a classic taste and soft texture.
If you’ve been a regular here at The Fit Cookie, you might know that we love cookies, especially chocolate chip cookies. We included it in our name after all!
Over the years, we have tested quite a few different allergy friendly cookie recipes and even though we’ve created some great ones, I’m always tinkering to find ways to make my recipes even better.
I ended up doing a recipe mashup of sorts with my old (2012) recipe for soft chocolate chip cookies and our classic chocolate chip cookie recipe to create a softer chocolate chip cookie that still has a classic texture but it’s made without pre-made gluten free baking blends!
Why we love this recipe
If you are avoiding gluten free baking blends due to rice flour in them or you can’t have xanthan gum, but you still want a great cookie texture, these are the perfect cookies for you.
After King Arthur flour changed their all purpose gluten free baking mix, I decided to revisit my original recipe for soft chocolate chip cookies and update it, but still not use a storebought flour blend so I wasn’t at the mercy of brand formulation changes.
I still love the King Arthur flours, but I wanted to go back to our roots with this recipe and make it without a flour blend.
How to make soft gluten free chocolate chip cookies
Here are the steps to make our soft gluten free and vegan chocolate chip cookies. This is just an overview with photos, the full recipe is in the recipe card.
- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F and line a baking sheet pan with parchment paper and set aside.
- In a medium bowl with a hand mixer or a stand mixer, cream together the room temperature dairy free butter, white sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla.
- Mix in the sorghum flour, golden flaxseed meal, tapioca starch, and half of the dairy free milk you are using. Mix until combined.
- Add in the oat flour, the baking soda, and salt, and mix again until a thick dough forms.
- Add the chocolate chips with the mixer or by hand.
- Roll the dough into 1-inch balls and place on a baking sheet at least 2 inches apart. Leave them in ball form, don’t press them down (they will spread on their own).
- Bake for 9 to 10 minutes (I like cooking for 9 minutes). Cool on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes before moving to a cooling rack. These will look a little puffed up when they immediately come out of the oven, but will sink as they cool.
- These will seem slightly underdone in middle at first, but they will firm up as they cool. But they will still be soft in the middle.
- Store in an airtight container or bag for up to 4 days. The texture of these cookies are best within the first 2 days after baking.
Flour notes for our cookies
Since we didn’t use a commercial gluten free flour blend in this recipe, we kind of created our own blend, but tried to keep the number of different flours we used to a minimum because let’s face it, gluten free flours can be expensive and we don’t need a ton of different flours in our pantries when fewer will do.
If you’re curious what the different flours and starches do here’s a brief rundown:
- Superfine sorghum flour: this bakes pretty similarly to brown rice flour. Since this is whole grain, it adds structure and starch for browning and crisp edges to the cookies. And because it’s superfine, it results in smoother and less gritty baked goods.
- Whole grain gluten free oat flour: this adds starch and structure as well, but also softness and moisture since oat flour absorbs more moisture than other flours and has soluble fiber that can gel up and keep things soft.
- Tapioca starch: tapioca starch helps gluten free baked goods crisp, while also keeping the inside soft and moist. Plus it doubles as a type of binder in this recipe in the absence of gluten or eggs in this recipe.
- Ground golden flaxseed: this isn’t technically a flour, but the ground flaxseed keeps things soft and moist. But more importantly it acts as a binder in this recipe since we aren’t using eggs. I use golden flaxseed and grind it fine so the color blends in well with our cookies.
This post was originally published in September 2012, and I recently remade the recipe, rewrote the post and recipe card, and took new photos. If you’re looking for the old/original recipe, I wrote it under the updated recipe card below!
Check out our other great allergy friendly cookie recipes!
Soft Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies (Dairy Free)
Ingredients
- ½ cup dairy free butter softened
- ½ cup unbleached sugar
- ½ cup packed brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 cup Authentic Foods superfine sorghum flour
- 2 Tablespoons ground golden flaxseed aka golden flaxmeal
- 1 Tablespoon tapioca starch
- ¼ cup dairy free milk of choice, divided
- 1 ¼ cups gluten free oat flour
- ¼ teaspoon baking soda
- ¼ to ½ teaspoon salt
- ½ to ⅔ cup chocolate chips
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F and line a baking sheet pan with parchment paper and set aside.
- In a medium bowl with a hand mixer or a stand mixer, cream together the room temperature dairy free butter, white sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla.
- Mix in the sorghum flour, golden flaxseed meal, tapioca starch, and half of the dairy free milk you are using. Mix until combined.
- Add in the oat flour, the baking soda, and salt, and mix again until a thick dough forms.
- Add the chocolate chips with the mixer or by hand.
- Roll the dough into 1-inch balls (or slightly larger than 1-inch) and place on a baking sheet at least 2 inches apart. Leave them in ball form, don't press them down (they will spread on their own).
- Bake for 9 to 10 minutes (I prefer baking for 9 minutes). Cool on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes before moving to a cooling rack.
- These will seem slightly underdone in middle at first, but they will firm up as they cool, but they will still be soft in the middle. I let the cookies cool for 10-15 minutes before eating them.
- Store in an airtight container or bag for up to 4 days. The texture of these cookies are best within the first 2 days after baking.
Nutrition
Pin for later!
Our original (September 2012) recipe
If you’ve been with us for years and are looking for the original recipe, here it is below!
Here are a few of the original photos so you can see what the older cookie recipe looked like:
Our old recipe for soft chocolate chip cookies
Ingredients
- 1 ¼ cup brown rice flour
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- 3 Tablespoons rice milk
- ¼ cup flax meal (I use golden flax meal)
- ¼ cup oil
- ¼ cup honey (for vegan, use agave syrup)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- ½ teaspoon liquid Stevia (optional)
- ⅓ to ½ cup dark chocolate chips
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare a baking stone or line a cookie sheet with parchment.
- In a small bowl, whisk together the brown rice flour, salt, and baking soda. Set aside.
- In a medium to large bowl, whisk together the milk and flax meal. The flax meal will start to gel and thicken.
- With a hand blender, beat in the oil, honey, vanilla, and Stevia (if using) until a creamy consistency.
- Add the flour mix to the wet ingredients and blend with the hand blender until mixed well (the dough will be quite firm).
- Add in the chocolate chips and mix in by hand.
- Drop cookie dough by Tablespoonfuls onto cookie sheet.
- Bake for 10 minutes until golden.
- Let rest on baking sheet for about 5 minutes, then cool completely on a wire rack.
- Enjoy!
Sarah Jane Parker is the founder, recipe creator, and photographer behind The Fit Cookie which she founded in 2011. Sarah is based in Wyoming and has been managing food allergies for herself and her 2 children for over 20 years. Sarah was also a certified personal trainer for 12 years, as well as a group fitness instructor, health coach, running coach, and fitness nutrition specialist.
I have been trying to make non-traditional ingredient cookies for years with no success. These are perfect, they’re delicious, they have good consistency and can’t say it enough, the flavor and texture is perfect! Love them!
Thank you so much Taffy!
what oil do you use ?
I usually use light tasting olive oil, but you can use other light tasting liquid oils like sunflower, safflower, canola, etc.
Olive oil
Thank you so much for these recipes! I stumbled across your site whilst looking for recipes for my Grandson who is allergic to all proteins in cows milk and eggs. What would you suggest I can use instead of the milk in this recipe? Would soya milk be ok or coconut milk?
Hi Jan! You can use any kind of milk in this recipe that you prefer: coconut, soy, rice, or almond 🙂
These are so good…SO good…I’m in cookie heaven!! Thank you so much for the awesome recipe. I’m going to use this batter for cookie dough bites too, since it’s eggless. Delicious!
Cookie dough bites sound so good right now!! This reminds me I need to bake a batch of these cookies tonight after dinner 🙂
I absolutely love these cookies! I just made a batch, and they are terrific. Thanks so much for this recipe.
Thank you Leslie! So glad you love them 🙂