The Outrageously Delicious Chocolate Chip Cookie Hack You Need to Try Immediately

If you’re like me, you’ll never say no to Nutella. Smeared in a crepe? Perfect. Baked into a brownie? Gimme. On a spoon? Try and stop me. Something I hadn’t considered until recently, however, is replacing regular ol’ chocolate chips in my cookies with Nutella. My previous forays into incorporating Nutella into cookies resulted in what I can only refer to as a chocolate-hazelnut cookie. Although delicious, I wanted a cookie that had chunks of Nutella sprinkled in. Enter: Nutella chips. Once I saw this, I immediately had to try it out for myself. 

Freezing Nutella into chips is incredibly easy. Transfer the Nutella to a piping bag or small zipper lock bag with the tip snipped off. Then just pipe the Nutella into small blobs on a parchment-lined baking sheet or large plate. I used 6 ounces of Nutella (which is most of a small jar) and got about 90 chips (which is about 3/4 cup of chips). Then just pop the whole tray into the freezer until the blobs are fully frozen, at least 1 hour. (This is a great time to get your cookie dough prepared.) 

Once the chips are ready, gently remove them from the parchment paper (I lifted the whole piece up and carefully pushed them off the paper with my hands from the underside.) From there, you can stir them right into your cookie dough. I opted for a soft chocolate chip cookie recipe, but feel free to choose your own adventure here. 

While this does take a bit more work than opening a bag of chocolate chips, I think it’s worth it. The “Nutella chip” cookies were a step above your average chocolate chip scenario and I’ll definitely be making them again. 

Freezing Nutella allows you to incorporate it into cookie dough without it totally smearing through and transforming it into chocolate-hazelnut cookie dough. However, Nutella is made with palm oil, which doesn’t freeze as easily or quickly as the cocoa butter in chocolate, so it took longer than I expected for the chips to fully freeze. 

Once they were solid, they were easy to work with, but began to soften quickly when introduced to the warmth of my hands and room-temperature cookie dough. By the time I was portioning the last bits of dough I did see some Nutella smears in the cookies. I’m not too precious about this and a little smearing was fine with me, although if you want to prevent it entirely, you might opt to chill your dough in the refrigerator for a few minutes about halfway through portioning the cookies, to give the chips a little time to firm up again.

• Flatten out peaks. I found it helpful to have a small bowl with water next to the tray I was piping onto. I periodically wet my finger and used it to flatten out the most dramatic chocolate peaks on the Nutella blobs.
• Don’t worry too much about making them identical. You don’t need factory-level precision here. As long as your blobs are pretty close in size, they’ll work just fine. Aim for about 1/4 inch in diameter, but don’t stress. 
• Don’t skimp on freezer time. Nutella doesn’t freeze as quickly as regular chocolate, so plan for 1 to 2 hours of freezing time.
• Work quickly and gently. The chips will begin to soften relatively quickly, so have your dough ready to go when you take the chips out of the freezer and work quickly when portioning cookies to avoid smearing.

If you want to make the chips ahead of time, after they are fully frozen solid, transfer them to an airtight container or zipper-lock freezer bag. You might have to gently break them up once you’re ready to use them, however.