Philip Khoury’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie Is Pure (Plant-Based) Pleasure

Baking is built around tradition: Staple ingredients. Precise measurements. Generational recipes. Butter. But the humble cookie both honors its history and defies it, traversing cultures, continents, and cuisines. There’s the Snickerdoodle and Whoopie pie, Spritzgebäck and Speculoos, Mantecados and Ma’amoul, Pryaniki and Yakgwa. For Philip Khoury—the award-winning chef, artisan chocolate maker, and former head of pastry at Harrods—there’s a sweet evolution happening, and you can even find it in his recipe for a classic chocolate chip cookie.

Khoury’s second cookbook, Beyond Baking: Plant-based Baking for a New Era, is led by flavor, process, and playful exploration. It traces Khoury’s years in the kitchen and test rooms building plant-based recipes that resist eggs and dairy as much as the highly processed alternatives, prioritizing ingredients you probably already have in your pantry. The results? A generous and jammy peach and hazelnut cake, and shiny, shattering almond croissants. There’s even a savory section, with cheesy sun buns and a mushroom and truffle quiche that explores the full umami spectrum.

For International Cookie Day, we’re leafing through Khoury’s particularly special cookie and biscuit chapter—pages of elevated classics and ambitious flavor combos. The expanse of a cookie, its crumbly craters and molten rivulets, is a playground for the pastry chef.

Photo: Matt Russell

When I catch up with Khoury—who is London-based, Australian-born, and of Lebanese descent—he’s just returned from a trip to Paris. “Paris is the home of patisserie, and holds a very special place in my heart,” says Khoury. After his final year of college, he sat down in front of a Paris cathedral to eat a pastry—a 2000 Feuilles from the legendary Pierre Herme—and that inspired him to pursue his own career as a chef. In 2023, he was honored with the La Liste Pastry Award for Innovation in Paris. I tell him that this past weekend, when I visited his pop-up at North London bakery favorite Fink’s, his hazelnut toasted vanilla bean and dark chocolate cookie gave me my own celestially sweet experience.

“I love a cookie that’s a little thick, but not so thick that you taste that unbaked flour. It has to be crisp on the outside, freshly baked. There’s good caramelization of sugar, fat, and flour, and there’s some chew in the middle,” he says. Khoury shouts out plant-based Manifold Bakery in Los Angeles for their excellent chocolate chip cookie, as well as Librae Bakery in New York. (He hosted pop-ups in both.) Nigella Lawson has sung the praises of Khoury’s peanut butter cookie, and his book also features delectable fig newtons, spiced macadamia shortbread biscuits, and stuffed almond croissant cookies.

“These cookie recipes are all based on different ways to extract flavor from nuts,” says Khoury. Nut butters are used in lieu of butter as a rich, flavorful fat base in some, while others grind whole nuts directly into the flour to allow their natural oils to release and enrich the dough as they mix and bake. “These subtle differences create unique textures and flavor profiles, offering something special in every bite,” Khoury says. Crispy-edged, soft-and-gooey-in-the-middle cookies tend to use less fat overall, keep well, and highlight deeper and more varied flavors. Khoury shouts out Buddy Buddy, the nut butter brand soon to make its foray into the U.S. with an outpost on the Bowery, just around the corner from Librae—particularly for its cinnamon roll butter.

From his travels, has Khoury noticed major differences in the pastry penchants of various countries and cultures? Quite the opposite. “People’s tastes are actually quite similar—even in France,” he says. “It’s strange, for a country with such a rich gastronomic history, that they have a strange obsession with American things like cookies and smash burgers. I was in Lille not too long ago, and one place that had a queue and consistent buzz was an American-style cookie shop. I think we’re seeing this homogenization of tastes.” Maybe it’s because we’re all on the same algorithm, getting the same recommendations from the same food influencers, I posit. But with Khoury and Beyond Baking, there’s a push to get more curious when it comes to your sweet treats.

“It’s a continuation of my first book, all about finding new ways to bake. We take these ingredients we’ve had forever—minus eggs and dairy—and look at how functional they truly are. There’s an over-reliance on ingredients that have got us to where we are with baking, and I think we’re almost shackled by that. It took something like 400 years to develop the kind of baked goods that we know and love now. We started with bread, added things like honey, eggs, and sugar, and ended up with cake. Now we can broaden our horizons. What’s coming up in the next 400 years? I also don’t believe a plant-based diet is going to be for everyone, but this is about giving people more options they’ll genuinely enjoy.”

Perusing the peanut butter and chocolate chip cookie recipe that Khoury has given Vogue from his book (yes, the one Nigella Lawson loves), any cynicism falls away. “When I started this book, there were no rules,” says Khoury. “Everything was done from scratch, reimagining things people know and love with no linear path. It’s fun and rewarding and challenging. I spent more time on a chapter that didn’t even make it into the book than I did on the rest of the book combined. Choux pastry, one of the basics!” While he had some success, there was a need for a tiny bit of xanthan gum—a common food additive he’d prefer not to use. “I made the tough decision to can the choux, but I’ll come back to it.” If it’s Khoury in the test kitchen, we can be assured that plant-based profiteroles and eclairs are on the horizon.

Khoury also runs his own artisanal chocolate company, Khourys, which crafts charmingly chubby chocolate bars as a “love letter” to various destinations around the world. They kicked their monthly drops off with the Beirut Chocolate Bar, an homage to Lebanon with thick waves of orange blossom caramel, crisp twice-baked cashew baklava, and cashew cream. The London Bar infuses Earl Grey into its caramel, with a biscuit crunch woven with notes of bergamot, vanilla, and sea salt. The New York Bar revels in classic American apple pie flavors, with cinnamon-spiced apple compote and a toasted almond crunch—the thick bar engraved with the Statue of Liberty. Khoury’s Beirut Bar became a viral hit in Lebanon—forget about Dubai Chocolate, for now.

“The philosophy for chocolate remains the same as cookies, pastries, everything,” says Khoury. “We’re breathing new life into formulations and techniques, with super clean ingredients, delivering something that everyone will find incredibly delicious and hit that sweet spot.”

This International Cookie Day, celebrate with Philip Khoury’s peanut butter chocolate chip cookie recipe below.

Photo: Matt Russell

Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

Need I say more? This decadent cookie takes inspiration from the chunky, indulgent style made famous by New York’s Levain Bakery. It’s perfect for when you want to whip up cookies using ready-made nut butter, as opposed to recipes like the Hazelnut and Toasted Vanilla Cookies, which derive flavor and fat from freshly ground roasted nuts. With rivulets of melted chocolate weaving through a nutty, tender morsel, these cookies are best enjoyed slightly warm, but their magic doesn’t end there. Stored in an airtight container, they will keep well for up to a week. When you’re ready for that molten, gooey goodness, simply pop one in the microwave for eight seconds for swift revival.

Makes 10 cookies.

• 100g/3.5 oz peanut butter
• 40g/1.4 oz groundnut (peanut) oil
• 210g/7.4 oz dark brown sugar
• 100g/3.5 oz water
• 260g/9.2 oz plain (all-purpose) flour
• 5g/1tsp baking powder
• 4g/½ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
• 2g/½ tsp fine sea salt
• 120g/4.2 oz dark chocolate
• 60g/2oz roasted peanuts
• Flaky sea salt for sprinkling

1. Put the peanut butter, groundnut oil, sugar, and water into a large bowl and whisk until fully combined and the mixture is smooth, homogenous, and there are no oily streaks.

2. In a separate large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, and salt.

3. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix with a silicone spatula until a dough forms. Chop the chocolate and peanuts, then mix them into the dough.

4. Leave the dough to rest for at least 2 hours, or wrap in cling film (plastic wrap) and rest overnight in the refrigerator—the dough can be stored in the refrigerator for up to three days

5. Preheat the oven to 180°C fan (350°F) and line two large baking sheets with baking parchment.

6. Divide the dough into 70g (2.5 oz) portions (about the size of a golf ball), then roll these into balls and arrange them on the prepared baking sheets, spaced 5 cm (2in) apart and away from the edge (you should be able to fit 12 per baking sheet). Top each with a sprinkle of flaky sea salt.

7. Bake in the oven for about 12 minutes for soft, fudgy cookies, or 15 minutes for crispier edges.

8. While the cookies are still warm, you can make them sexy and perfectly round—use a large plain cutter or ring and rotate it around the cookies quickly to tuck in and ‘round’ the edges.

These will keep well for up to one week in an airtight container, although they are especially good on the first day before the chocolate has cooled down and reset into chunks.