Saturday, February 13, 2010

Batch 75

The recipe for Batch 75 is:
¼ cup sunflower seeds
¼ cup walnuts
2 tbsp sesame seeds
1 cup rolled oats
½ cup raisins
¼ cup steel cut oats
½ cup whole wheat flour
2 tbsp wheat germ
½ cup rice flour
¼ cup turbinado sugar
¼ cup dry milk
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp cinnamon
5 medium eggs
3 tbsp molasses
¼ cup + 1 tbsp honey
½ cup sunflower oil
1 tsp vanilla
Preheat oven to 350 degrees and toast sunflower seeds and walnuts for 8-10 minutes, or just until fragrant and starting to turn color. Toast sesame seeds separately until just starting to turn color. Toast rolled oats until fragrant. Place the seeds and nuts in a food processor with the raisins and most of the rolled oats, and process until the raisins are all well-chopped.

Stir the chopped nut-and-seed mixture together with the rest of the rolled oats and the remaining dry ingredients.

In a separate bowl, mix the wet ingredients, stirring until well mixed, without introducing much air.

Stir the wet ingredients and dry ingredients together until completely blended. Drop in heaping tablespoonsful onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until edges are browned.


To enhance the chewiness, this batch is even heavier on the egg and honey than previous batches; I eliminated the milk and reduced the sugar to compensate. For both chewiness and the 'little white dots' that I remember, I finally thought of steel-cut oats. I tried a bit of rice flour; I've been wondering if that might help the sheen a bit.

I won't comment on what I think of this recipe until the taste-testers have weighed in.

4 comments:

  1. This is much closer than the other 2 batches. It has the same shininess, and pretty much the same texture as the original guerilla cookie. It needs to be a litle moister and it needs to have some sort of more flavor...more of some spice, maybe...?

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  2. Hi Karen
    I tried to do your recipe 75 yesterday. The dough/batter in my batch was so wet that I added a few tablespoons of extra rice flour. They still pancaked out a little too much.

    I agree with anonymous comment about a little more flavor. I don't think the rice flour is quite right and they need a bit more sugar, nuts, raisins and maybe back to 4 TBS/ 1/4 Cup molasses. I'd probably cut back a bit on the honey to compensate for the other changes. The 5 eggs seems excessive for this small batch recipe. I would back off to just 4 for sure.

    John
    PS I just sprinkled the strong vietnamese cinnamon into this batch without measuring and discovered what too much cinnamon does to the flavor. I will measure next time and maybe I shouldn't even use the good stuff (fancy Vietnamese cinnamon) in these.

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  3. My reaction to Batch 75: it's close to the original, but there's still a ways to go. The Batch 75 cookies I had tasted just slightly burned to me. In addition, they did not seem quite as moist as the original and they also seemed a little sweeter than the original. My recollection is that the originals were not really all that sweet (they were crunchy rather than sweet) and that they were a little bit moist, with the moistness tasting like the moistness you'd get from seed oil. Finally, for what it's worth, I remember the shape of the original as being what, I think, the French would call "dodu" (spelling?)--that is sort of puffy or mounded up in the middle rather than relatively flat. And, speaking of (and, in fact, in) French: "Courage--encore un effort."

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  4. Nancy commented to me in person, rather than posting here. She said that batch 75 was pretty much exactly what she remembered guerrilla cookies to be.

    I do think it's getting closer, but I agree with the other taste-testers that something is still not quite right.

    Peter, tu es très perspicace. Je ne brûle presque les graines de sésame. J'étais tout simplement trop paresseux pour griller un autre lot. (And thanks for the opportunity to admit that in French so that not everyone can understand!)

    I agree with John about the rice flour. I needed to satisfy my curiosity, but I think I noticed the missing flavor when some of the whole wheat was replaced with rice. As for the eggs, it was goofy of me to buy medium eggs to try to save a few pennies. I'm trying to make a replicable recipe here, and my understanding is that large eggs are assumed in most standard recipes.

    Thanks again to everyone. Maintenant, encore un effort!

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