Welcome welcome! Thanks for meeting me here for newsletter No. 19.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already a subscriber, a fellow follower of all that is exciting and engaging about the world of baking with whole grains.
If this is your first time here, you can expect musings, commentary, ideas and inspiration concerning the act and art of baking, including its more esoteric bits and pieces.
The words ‘brown butter’ and ‘oatmeal’ as headline acts in any recipe will suck me in and stop me in my tracks. And this is before we even imagine them co-existing in the same recipe.
It’s the alliteration of the ‘B-B’ as it bounces between your lips. It’s the soft, round sound of the ‘O’, akin to the sigh of a baby dachshund.
Lexical gustatory synesthesia is a thing, and this is it in action. Words so phonetically fluid and melodic that they slip into your mind and onto your palate like maple syrup down a hot pancake. You can smell the nut-brown milk solids of beurre noisette and taste their richness on your tongue. You can feel the warmth and comfort from oat’s sweet cream and vanillin notes and detect a familiar soft and tender texture.
Combine the two and add the killer ending ‘cookie’, and you’re in for a good time.
I’ve long been a fan of Sarah Owens and her approach to baking, which is rooted in a passion for plants and a natural flair for flowers. It seamlessly translates to an inspiring sensibility in her use of milled flour of the seed and cereal kind. I'm sure some of you will know of her work, but if you don’t, check out her books and workshops to see more of what she creates.
Sarah’s recipes honour regional grains and are underpinned by a deep love of all things fermented, offering sage advice on how to incorporate fermentation and fermented products into all areas of baking, beyond traditional sourdough and into the realms of fermented pie pastry, cakes and biscuits.
These recipes are a refreshing source of inspiration for me, a manual of sorts for ideas and understanding of how and why regional grains here in the UK perform the way they do. (Sarah is based in California, where I don’t think the climate and soil could be more different to Yorkshire.)
One such recipe for brown butter oatmeal and einkorn cookies snatched my attention and became the origin point for the adapted recipe shared below. As per almost all of Sarah’s recipes, it uses a small amount of sourdough starter, and the cookie dough benefits from some time to ferment. As nearly everyone is used to resting cookie dough these days, it seems the most accessible place to begin if you want to use your sourdough starter beyond bread baking.
Brown Butter, Oat & Granola Cookie
The microscopic processes occurring during fermentation offer benefits by pre-digesting indigestible or difficult-to-digest compounds. The same processes create and release new flavours. Large flavour compounds are metabolised into smaller compounds, existing flavours are amplified, and new flavours form as these smaller compounds react with each other. In effect, the sourdough culture seasons from within, resulting in a complex, rich and interestingly flavoured cookie.
You can use any granola you like in this recipe; I’ve made multiple batches with prime chunky clusters and the broken remnants in the bottom of the box. Subscribers to the ‘Extra Credit’ portion of the newsletter will find my favourite Chunky Nut Granola recipe a little further down, the perfect granola for snacking and turning into cookies.
And for the record, nuts or chocolate chunks could also be used in place of the granola or the raisins if you’re of a raisin-adverse disposition.
These cookies bake up as an oat-based cookie should, with a bit of softness and cake-like texture. Adding the granola lends more chew and nudges the texture into a flapjack direction.
If you’re a chewy, crispy-edged cookie connoisseur, then a few tweaks can make this recipe more of what you love. I’ll share some notes on those tweaks in a follow on thread, so comment below if you’re interested.
Ingredients
120g butter (weight before browning (approx 100g once browned)
60g soft brown sugar (light or dark) or panela sugar
40g caster sugar
1 whole egg
30g 100% rye mother
90g rolled oats*
80g Ølands Wholewheat flour
1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2tsp flaky sea salt
1/2tsp favourite warm spice(s) (cinnamon, ginger, clove, nutmeg, star anise or mix of)
50g granola
50g raisins
*Rolled oats run the gamut from well-defined with considerable integrity to paper thin and powdery. Some claim to be jumbo or whole rolled when really they are broken and more like porridge oats. I made versions using types from both ends of the range. Know that you can, too; just expect the outcome to be a little different. Avoid instant oats. In the following photos, you can see how cookies made with whole-rolled oats spread more compared to those made with porridge oats. The more broken the oats, the more likely they are to absorb moisture, the powdery nature working similarly to flour, thickening and absorbing more hydration from the dough.
Method
Brown the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat; observe; it will boil and get foamy as the water evaporates and the milk, sugar and proteins start to brown. Once you detect a hint of nuttiness, whisk to stop the brown solids from sticking to the bottom of the pan and stick it out as long as you dare to deepen the colour before removing it from the heat and immediately pouring it into a bowl to cool.
Once cool, add the sugars and mix; add the egg, then the starter and whisk until the mixture is streak free and even.
Combine the oats, flour, bicarbonate of soda, spices and salt in a bowl, and mix well to ensure the dry ingredients are evenly mixed and mingled.
Fold the dry ingredients into the wet and mix until only a hint of flour remains, add the granola and raisins and finish folding to distribute the mix-ins evenly.
Scrape the dough into a box, cover it with a lid and let it hang out at a cool room temp for an hour before storing it in the fridge. You’re the master of your destiny here; leave well alone for as long as you can resist. I’ve rested the dough like this for up to 5 days, baking off scoops at varying intervals to find its flavourful sweet spot.
Let’s face it, it’ll be good to go after just a few hours, but within 48 hours, you’ll have something noticeably more complex, with texture and flavour peaking at the 3-day mark. By this time, the cookies have a characteristic vanilla note despite not containing any vanilla bean or extract. After consulting Harold (McGee, of course), I decided that as the dough rested and aged, it did so most graciously, the vanillin inherent within the oats liberated by the magic of multiple nights’ sleep.
Worth noting that from day three onwards, the flavour did not noticeably change, but the texture of the dough became drier and more prone to crumbling.
When you’re ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 175°C, scoop the dough to your desired size, and flatten them out to approximately 1cm thick. FYI, I scaled each scoop to 70g (my preferred cookie number).
Bake on a lined baking sheet for 10 minutes, rotate the tray and continue to bake for 5 minutes more or until the cookies are golden brown around the edges and a little puffed in the centre.