While the selection of gluten-free snacks is ever growing, not all products are created equal. Mass-produced desserts are notorious for excessive amounts of processed sugar and fat, while more thoughtfully produced items sometimes compromise taste or texture to deliver a more healthful product.
Customers of chef Kate Wagner never have such worries. Wagner’s training in European pastry and her decades of experience have enabled her to deliver gluten-free cakes, pastries and breads with all the lightness, flakiness and bounce of conventional versions. To boot, her foods are also “clean” for their exclusion of refined sugar, soy, nuts and dairy.
Now, Wagner is filling a niche with a line of handmade slice- and-bake cookie doughs called Cookeez. The raw dough rolls come in three flavors — chocolate chip, a vegan lemon-ginger and Lava Road chocolate fudge. Each roll is $12 and yields about 20 cookies. Some details:
>> Wagner’s chocolate chip cookie is indistinguishable from a conventional version, and like all chocolate chip cookies, is especially delicious warm.
It features a generous helping of semisweet chocolate chips, plus coconut palm sugar, sea salt and a nonsoy vegetable oil.
>> Thanks to the use of an egg substitute, the lemon-ginger cookie dough is vegan and can be eaten raw.
Starting with a basic snickerdoodle base, Wagner jazzes up the flavor with lemon grass, lemon zest and dried hibiscus. But it is the morsels of locally sourced fresh ginger that add a lively zing.
Other ingredients include nonsoy vegetable oil, raw cane sugar and sea salt.
>> The Lava Road chocolate fudge cookie is a particular winner, proving that a good, versatile recipe is invaluable. A riff off Wagner’s popular fudge brownie, this cookie will win nods from the most serious chocolate lovers. It is crisp where the brownie is soft, a sturdier snack to eat in hand than the brownie, with its delicate crumb.
It inherits a rich, full-bodied chocolate flavor created with cocoa powder, cocoa butter, raw cane sugar, sea salt and chocolate from the Big Island.
Baking up these cookies is as simple and convenient as working with the mass-produced cookie dough rolls sold in supermarkets. Just preheat the oven, slice the amount of cookies you want to eat and bake 10 to 15 minutes. Voila! Fresh-from-the-oven treats.
Doughs keep 30 days in the refrigerator and 90 days in the freezer. Frozen rolls need just five or 10 minutes to thaw on the counter for the dough to become sliceable, and the plastic wrap makes it easy to rewrap rolls securely before returning to the fridge or freezer. (Wrappers and labels are recyclable, Wagner said.)
With no compromises in texture and taste, Wagner’s cookies are as satisfying to a person with no dietary restrictions as they are to a gluten-free eater.
She said the Cookeez rolls will eventually make their way into various local supermarkets.
For now, there are several ways to place an order: Go to notjustdessertscafe.com; email notjustdessertshi@gmail.com or chefkatepresents@gmail.com; or call or text 489-3749.
The rolls can be delivered or shipped.
“Going Gluten-Free” helps meet the cooking and dining challenges faced by those on wheat-free diets. It runs on the first Wednesday of each month. Send questions to Joleen Oshiro, joshiro@staradvertiser.com.
