Big and Chewy Low-Fat Chocolate Chip Cookies

With huge amounts of chocolate chips, butter, and sugar, it's no wonder that classic big and chewy chocolate chip cookies taste so good. We tried all sorts of substitutes--including applesauce, banana puree, molasses, and carob chips--to reduce the calories and fat in these cookies, but ended up with tasteless cookies or, worse, cookies with unpleasant flavors. So how do you make a low-fat chocolate chip cookie you'd actually want to eat? Here's what we discovered.

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• Use date puree to replace three-quarters of the butter--you'll still get a flavorful and tender cookie.
• Browning the remaining butter concentrates and boosts its flavor, adding just enough richness to mask the slight fruit flavor from the dates.
• With the browned butter, the batter is flavorful enough to allow you to cut the amount of chocolate chips back to 1/2 cup.
• To make sure each cookie contains some chips, press a portion of the chips over each dough ball just before putting the cookies in the oven.
• Traditional chocolate chip cookies have 220 calories, 8 grams of (total) fat, and 5 grams of saturated fat. Our Big and Chewy Low-Fat Chocolate Chip Cookies have 120 calories, 3 grams of (total) fat, and 2 grams of saturated fat.