Kitchn Love Letters

For the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies, I Always Add a Few Teaspoons of This Italian Grocery to the Dough (the Flavor Is Unreal)

Mackenzie Filson
Mackenzie Filson
Mackenzie Filson is a food & beverage writer and native Floridian. Her work has appeared in PUNCH, Delish, Kitchn, and EatingWell, amongst others. You can read more of her writing in her newsletter, Book Sommelier, where she pairs books with wine (her one party trick.)
published Jan 31, 2025
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coffee chocolate chip cookies on a baking sheet
Credit: Photo: Joe Lingeman; Food Styling: Anna Stockwell

Can you do me a tiny favor? I want you to go into your kitchen and grab a bottle of balsamic vinegar, because we are baking chocolate chip cookies. I know you’re likely hearing the record scratch, but stay with me here.

That balsamic vinegar you typically relegate to glazes and salad dressing has a magically sweet destiny ahead of it. And no, you’re not being Punk’d. It couldn’t be more the opposite actually; you’re about to be … Upgrade’d

Credit: Mackenzie Filson


You know how the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, essentially runs on (and smells of) chocolate? There’s a similar experience in the Italian city of Modena, where I found balsamic vinegar on every table, every morning at the hotel breakfast buffet, and even piped inside chocolate truffles, soaked into dates, and folded into panettone. I couldn’t get over how this tart, syrupy liquid gold elicited a comic-book POW from my taste buds, especially when added to something sweet. In fact, it’s the only way I bake chocolate chip cookies now, making even $ store-bought dough taste like it’s solidly $$$. 

Credit: Mackenzie Filson

Why I Always Add a Few Drops of Balsamic Vinegar to Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

While you can use pretty much any store-bought cookie dough, Trader Joe’s Super Chocolatey  Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies are what I typically grab. After baking the cookies, I let them cool for a minute or two and then add a few vinegar drops per cookie to the batch. To me, the vinegar almost mimics the experience of having a chocolate-covered strawberry or raspberry (rather than just a piece of chocolate), with the acidity cutting through the sugar and fat. All the flavors come together to form a real party on the tongue.

Credit: Mackenzie Filson

You’ll want to be more discerning when it comes to your balsamic vinegar. A basic vinegar just won’t do. It will lack the bright pop of mouth-puckering fruitiness and silky thickness that’ll make the chocolate in your cookies taste even more rich and unctuous. (it’s just as good on store-bought vanilla ice cream, too.)


For the purposes of uniting these two buddies (vinegar + sweets), opt for DOP-labeled (if you’re feeling deluxe and want to shell out, look out for these sexy little bottles) or IGP-certified bottles of Balsamic Vinegar of Modena (these are more moderately priced; you can get a great bottle at Whole Foods, World Market, or Trader Joe’s for $7 or less). I’ve added drops of each to freshly baked cookies, and even with their very different price point, the chocolate still popped, much like vinegar brings out the sweetness of a fig on a salad.

Credit: Mackenzie Filson

These particular bottles go through a much more stringent production and aging process and are named as such for the protected regions in which the vinegar is produced (I’ve nerded out about it at length here). But generally, DOP and IGP-certified bottles of vinegar will feel like a distant cousin to the mostly acidic bottles you might see at a salad bar. They’re denser, lightly cherry-tart and more inky. A few dropfuls are all you’ll need to make most desserts sparkle.

Buy: Whole Foods Market Aged Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, $5.49 for 8.5 ounces at Amazon

What pantry staples do you add to make your desserts taste 100x better? Tell us about it in the comments below.