Salted Masa Chocolate Chip–Pecan Cookies

Masa harina is most often destined for tortillas and tamales, but in these chocolate chip cookies from 2023 F&W Best New Chef Edgar Rico and his wife and business partner, Sara Mardanbigi, the ingredient shows just how compelling it can be in desserts. A modest amount of the nixtamalized corn flour joins all-purpose flour in the dough, bringing its unmistakable corn flavor to a familiar combination of semisweet chocolate and toasted nuts. The result lands somewhere beyond the usual chocolate chip cookie: The edges bake crisp and golden, while the centers stay tender and light, with a delicate texture that reflects masa harina’s lack of gluten.

A generous shower of flaky sea salt is especially important here. It sharpens the flavor of the chocolate, reins in the sweetness, and makes the masa harina and pecans more noticeable. Don’t hold back on it; the cookies can handle a good sprinkling.

The other key to their texture is time. The shaped dough freezes for at least four hours before going into a hot oven, which helps limit spreading as the butter melts. That long freeze has a practical advantage, too: Once the portions are frozen solid, they can be stashed in an airtight container in the freezer and baked whenever you want them, without thawing. Keep the cookies on their baking sheet until completely cool. They’re delicate while warm but firm up as they sit, giving you crisp edges, tender centers, pockets of melted chocolate, and crunchy pecans in every bite.

Make sure to use masa harina, not cornmeal

Masa harina isn’t simply finely ground cornmeal. It’s made from corn that has undergone nixtamalization, an alkaline treatment that gives the flour its characteristic flavor and changes how it behaves. Cornmeal and conventional corn flour haven’t undergone that same process and aren’t good substitutes when a recipe specifically calls for masa harina. Here, the masa harina is a defining flavor, so use a good-quality product with a fresh, pronounced corn aroma. The recipe was successfully tested with Masienda masa harina.

Why you should freeze the dough before baking

The dough is quite soft when freshly mixed, so portion it with a scoop and handle it as little as possible to avoid warming the butter. Slightly flatten each portion, season with flaky salt, and freeze for at least four hours. Baking the dough directly from frozen helps control spreading and butter leakage and gives the cookies their thick shape. Keep any portions you aren’t baking in the freezer while the first batch is in the oven. 

Notes from the Food & Wine Test Kitchen

• Don’t be shy with the flaky sea salt. A generous sprinkling provides an important savory counterpoint to the sweet dough and semisweet chocolate.
• You can use chocolate chips instead of baking chunks. Or, for best flavor and meltiness, chop up a bar of chocolate. 
• Let the baked cookies cool completely on the baking sheet before moving them. The masa harina makes their texture particularly delicate while they’re still warm.

This recipe was developed by Edgar Rico and Sara Mardanbigi; the text was written by Ann Taylor Pittman.

Excerpted from NIXTA TAQUERIA PRESENTS: FROM TACOS TO TAHDIG: Recipes and Stories from Mexico, Iran, and the In-Between by Sara Mardanbigi and Edgar Rico with JJ Goode. Text copyright © 2026 by Sara Mardanbigi and Edgar Rico. Photographs copyright © 2026 by Mackenzie Smith. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.