Recipe: Oatmeal Hobnobs
2 April 2019 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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gluten_freeThese Homemade Hobnob cookies are nicely crunchy with a little chew to them, last for several days on the counter, and I like them so much that after I made them for the first time, I just kept on making them, like five times in a row.
Because they're so simple, they're also versatile, and I made a bunch of variations that I've included at the end, including a rice-free version that is indistinguishable from the original version.
Ingredients:
150 grams coarsely chopped rolled oats (1 1/2 cups)
30 grams oat flour (1/4 cup)
65 grams superfine brown rice flour (1/2 cup)
33 grams superfine white rice flour (1/4 cup)
32 grams tapioca starch (1/4 cup)
150 grams granulated sugar (3/4 cup)
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1 extra large egg
110 grams neutral vegetable oil (1/2 cup minus two teaspoons)
1 tablespoon honey or maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Time: Fifteen minutes of prep, optional 1-2 hour rest, and about forty minutes of cooking time.
Tools: Food processor or blender.
Instructions:
1. Give your rolled oats a whirl in the food processor or blender until they're...smaller—not all the way into flour, you still want them a little chunky. Or, if you don't have either of those contraptions, you could probably use quick oats instead of rolled.
2. Whisk together the dry ingredients! In a separate thing, whisk together the wet ingredients! I like to put the sugar in with the wet ingredients, but you don't have to. No one's going to ask. Now, add the wet ingredients to the dry! Combine them!
3. This dough is soft and easily stirred by hand. Once everything's combined it's going to look like sad, pale, slippery, slimy oatmeal. Just the saddest, coldest bowl of raw porridge you could ever imagine. That's fine. At this point, because I didn't use superfine rice flour, I stick the sad oatmeal in the fridge, covered, to give my chunky rice flours time to soak up some liquid.
4. An hour or two later, or whenever, take your dough out to warm up a bit and preheat the oven to 350°F. I use a single insulated cookie sheet covered with parchment paper, but you can use two cookie sheets if you are diligent with switching them around and rotating them halfway through the cooking time.
5. Scoop out a tablespoon of dough, like, half a golf ball. Put it on your cookie sheet and use your fingers to flatten it into a round disk about ¼ inch thick and no more than two inches across. Keep doing this. I could comfortably fit nine on my square cookie sheet. They spread quite a bit, so you want to leave about two inches between them. The dough might seem oily, but the cookies won't be.
6. Put in the oven on the middle rack. I cook mine about 13 minutes, but your oven may vary. So do this: Bake 9 minutes. Turn the sheet around. Now, bake 4-6 minutes more but stay close until you know how long they take. They go from lightly tanned to dark brown fast. You want them a nice golden brown. Keep your eye peeled.
7. Are you done yet? Transfer cookies to a rack using a flipper, and then cool completely. They get more crisp as they cool, but you can easily be eating these about ten minutes later. Makes around 30 cookies. Store them in an air-tight container at room temperature for 3 to 4 days. Or freeze.
Notes:
Gluten Free Canteen's recipe calls for superfine rice flours, but I only have Bob's, which are not superfine, so if that's you, go ahead and use your coarse-ass rice flours, just measure them by weight rather than volume (if you can). I stick the dough in the fridge for two hours to give it some time to soften up, and the cookies aren't gritty at all, so either my plan worked, or the superfine part isn't so important in this application.
If you're impatient or in a hurry or don't have any room in your fridge, you can bake these off immediately, but know that the dough is harder to shape when it's warm and spreads more when baking. I skipped this step, once, as an experiment, and the cookies still weren't gritty, but the dough was sticky and floppy and hard to shape. I use a disher when I make cookies, and when I plopped the room temperature dough onto the cookie sheet, it just spread out on its own like a blob. So I let it. I put the cookies directly into the oven and everything was basically fine.
My cookies turn out exactly like the photo. They have a great shape, flat and round, and they're nicely crunchy and crispy, even on the second or third day. I've never had a real hobnob so I have nothing to compare them to, but they smell like graham crackers while they're baking and weirdly enough don't taste much like oats once they're done. Mostly they have a kind of buttery brown sugar/toffee taste. I actually find them to be a little on the sweet side, but they taste better to me the second day. They last for four days on the counter in an air-tight container, crispy the whole time. They'd probably make it to Day Five, but I once ate a stale gluten-free cookie and it tasted like failed dreams and I never want to do that again, so I freeze any loiterers.
I like these cookies as is, but I also thought they'd work well as a base, so I made up some variations on the theme.
Variations:
* Spice Hobnobs: Add 1 tsp cinnamon to your dry ingredients. Also good options, though I haven't had a chance to experiment: nutmeg, allspice, clove. Cardamom if you like it.
* Almond Hobnobs: I took 1/2 cup of sliced almonds (50 grams) and broke them up a little in the food processor since I already had it out, and instead of vanilla extract, I used 1/2 tsp of almond extract. The extract bumps up the almond taste and the nuts use up the sugar so they don't taste as sweet. I put a little extra salt in these, too, just a pinch.
* Chocolate Chip Hobnobs: Add 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips (100 grams) to dough at the end. You could use regular-sized chocolate chips, but they're gonna mess with your form factor.
* Chocolate Hobnobs: Add 1/4 cup cocoa powder (20 grams) to dry ingredients. I always sift cocoa so it isn't clumpy. If you want, throw in 1/4 cup of mini chocolate chips (50 grams) or chopped chocolate. Proceed as usual. I liked these better the second day too.
* Lemon Hobnobs: Omit the extract entirely. Add the zest of one lemon (~1 tsp) and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice to your wet ingredients. Let this dough chill in the fridge for at least an hour to give it time to soak up the extra liquid or it'll be too goopy to deal with. These taste exactly like a certain kind of animal cracker. Because of the lemon juice reacting to the baking soda and expelling gasses, these cookies aren't as dense or crunchy as the other hobnobs and have a kind of holey structure where the lemon was doing chemistry. The texture was best the first day, crisp but tender; as time went on they got a little brittle, but the flavor held up to four days on the counter—which is as long as they lasted.
* Gingerbread Hobnobs: Use 1 tablespoon molasses instead of honey/maple syrup, and add 1/4 tsp ground ginger to dry ingredients. Might experiment later with half brown sugar & half white.
Rice-Free:
I've made this a number of times and find it indistinguishable from the original recipe. I've also made it with the almond, choc chip, chocolate, and gingerbread variations and it works just fine:
150 grams coarsely chopped rolled oats (1 1/2 cups)
95 grams oat flour (~1 cup)
65 grams cassava flour (~1/2 cup)
150 grams granulated sugar (3/4 cup)
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1 large egg
110 grams neutral vegetable oil (1/2 cup minus two teaspoons)
1 tablespoon honey or maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Create your own! Once you make the basic recipe (either original or riceless), you can get a pretty good idea of how much of something you can add to it before it'll become too dry—or wet—to function. And please share if you come up with a new version.
This recipe appeared on my journal in a slightly different form.
Because they're so simple, they're also versatile, and I made a bunch of variations that I've included at the end, including a rice-free version that is indistinguishable from the original version.
Ingredients:
150 grams coarsely chopped rolled oats (1 1/2 cups)
30 grams oat flour (1/4 cup)
65 grams superfine brown rice flour (1/2 cup)
33 grams superfine white rice flour (1/4 cup)
32 grams tapioca starch (1/4 cup)
150 grams granulated sugar (3/4 cup)
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1 extra large egg
110 grams neutral vegetable oil (1/2 cup minus two teaspoons)
1 tablespoon honey or maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Time: Fifteen minutes of prep, optional 1-2 hour rest, and about forty minutes of cooking time.
Tools: Food processor or blender.
Instructions:
1. Give your rolled oats a whirl in the food processor or blender until they're...smaller—not all the way into flour, you still want them a little chunky. Or, if you don't have either of those contraptions, you could probably use quick oats instead of rolled.
2. Whisk together the dry ingredients! In a separate thing, whisk together the wet ingredients! I like to put the sugar in with the wet ingredients, but you don't have to. No one's going to ask. Now, add the wet ingredients to the dry! Combine them!
3. This dough is soft and easily stirred by hand. Once everything's combined it's going to look like sad, pale, slippery, slimy oatmeal. Just the saddest, coldest bowl of raw porridge you could ever imagine. That's fine. At this point, because I didn't use superfine rice flour, I stick the sad oatmeal in the fridge, covered, to give my chunky rice flours time to soak up some liquid.
4. An hour or two later, or whenever, take your dough out to warm up a bit and preheat the oven to 350°F. I use a single insulated cookie sheet covered with parchment paper, but you can use two cookie sheets if you are diligent with switching them around and rotating them halfway through the cooking time.
5. Scoop out a tablespoon of dough, like, half a golf ball. Put it on your cookie sheet and use your fingers to flatten it into a round disk about ¼ inch thick and no more than two inches across. Keep doing this. I could comfortably fit nine on my square cookie sheet. They spread quite a bit, so you want to leave about two inches between them. The dough might seem oily, but the cookies won't be.
6. Put in the oven on the middle rack. I cook mine about 13 minutes, but your oven may vary. So do this: Bake 9 minutes. Turn the sheet around. Now, bake 4-6 minutes more but stay close until you know how long they take. They go from lightly tanned to dark brown fast. You want them a nice golden brown. Keep your eye peeled.
7. Are you done yet? Transfer cookies to a rack using a flipper, and then cool completely. They get more crisp as they cool, but you can easily be eating these about ten minutes later. Makes around 30 cookies. Store them in an air-tight container at room temperature for 3 to 4 days. Or freeze.
Notes:
Gluten Free Canteen's recipe calls for superfine rice flours, but I only have Bob's, which are not superfine, so if that's you, go ahead and use your coarse-ass rice flours, just measure them by weight rather than volume (if you can). I stick the dough in the fridge for two hours to give it some time to soften up, and the cookies aren't gritty at all, so either my plan worked, or the superfine part isn't so important in this application.
If you're impatient or in a hurry or don't have any room in your fridge, you can bake these off immediately, but know that the dough is harder to shape when it's warm and spreads more when baking. I skipped this step, once, as an experiment, and the cookies still weren't gritty, but the dough was sticky and floppy and hard to shape. I use a disher when I make cookies, and when I plopped the room temperature dough onto the cookie sheet, it just spread out on its own like a blob. So I let it. I put the cookies directly into the oven and everything was basically fine.
My cookies turn out exactly like the photo. They have a great shape, flat and round, and they're nicely crunchy and crispy, even on the second or third day. I've never had a real hobnob so I have nothing to compare them to, but they smell like graham crackers while they're baking and weirdly enough don't taste much like oats once they're done. Mostly they have a kind of buttery brown sugar/toffee taste. I actually find them to be a little on the sweet side, but they taste better to me the second day. They last for four days on the counter in an air-tight container, crispy the whole time. They'd probably make it to Day Five, but I once ate a stale gluten-free cookie and it tasted like failed dreams and I never want to do that again, so I freeze any loiterers.
I like these cookies as is, but I also thought they'd work well as a base, so I made up some variations on the theme.
Variations:
* Spice Hobnobs: Add 1 tsp cinnamon to your dry ingredients. Also good options, though I haven't had a chance to experiment: nutmeg, allspice, clove. Cardamom if you like it.
* Almond Hobnobs: I took 1/2 cup of sliced almonds (50 grams) and broke them up a little in the food processor since I already had it out, and instead of vanilla extract, I used 1/2 tsp of almond extract. The extract bumps up the almond taste and the nuts use up the sugar so they don't taste as sweet. I put a little extra salt in these, too, just a pinch.
* Chocolate Chip Hobnobs: Add 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips (100 grams) to dough at the end. You could use regular-sized chocolate chips, but they're gonna mess with your form factor.
* Chocolate Hobnobs: Add 1/4 cup cocoa powder (20 grams) to dry ingredients. I always sift cocoa so it isn't clumpy. If you want, throw in 1/4 cup of mini chocolate chips (50 grams) or chopped chocolate. Proceed as usual. I liked these better the second day too.
* Lemon Hobnobs: Omit the extract entirely. Add the zest of one lemon (~1 tsp) and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice to your wet ingredients. Let this dough chill in the fridge for at least an hour to give it time to soak up the extra liquid or it'll be too goopy to deal with. These taste exactly like a certain kind of animal cracker. Because of the lemon juice reacting to the baking soda and expelling gasses, these cookies aren't as dense or crunchy as the other hobnobs and have a kind of holey structure where the lemon was doing chemistry. The texture was best the first day, crisp but tender; as time went on they got a little brittle, but the flavor held up to four days on the counter—which is as long as they lasted.
* Gingerbread Hobnobs: Use 1 tablespoon molasses instead of honey/maple syrup, and add 1/4 tsp ground ginger to dry ingredients. Might experiment later with half brown sugar & half white.
Rice-Free:
I've made this a number of times and find it indistinguishable from the original recipe. I've also made it with the almond, choc chip, chocolate, and gingerbread variations and it works just fine:
150 grams coarsely chopped rolled oats (1 1/2 cups)
95 grams oat flour (~1 cup)
65 grams cassava flour (~1/2 cup)
150 grams granulated sugar (3/4 cup)
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1 large egg
110 grams neutral vegetable oil (1/2 cup minus two teaspoons)
1 tablespoon honey or maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Create your own! Once you make the basic recipe (either original or riceless), you can get a pretty good idea of how much of something you can add to it before it'll become too dry—or wet—to function. And please share if you come up with a new version.
This recipe appeared on my journal in a slightly different form.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-02 08:07 pm (UTC)Chocolate hobnobs here we come. Will report back
Also, the “spatula vs flipper vs turner” convo at the link is A+++
no subject
Date: 2019-04-02 08:33 pm (UTC)Notes from try #1
Date: 2019-04-04 06:51 pm (UTC)No blender, used a Zyliss Zig-Zag chopper* on the rolled oats, which worked fine.
98 g of Bob's brown-rice flour (had no white rice flour, nor any superfine rice flours)
157 g white sugar (my hand slipped, and I poured straight into the bowl and couldn't spoon pure sugar back out)
20 g cocoa powder
110 g peanut oil
1 Tbs maple syrup
55 g mini dark chocolate chips
When I beat together the ingredients, the "saddest, coldest bowl of raw porridge" was nowhere in evidence. The dough was very rigid, and cracked apart under its own weight.
What was different? I triple-checked the recipe and realized:
You specified an extra large egg and my eggs are simply large.
I consulted the "egg equivalents" info provided by the American Egg Board, where they said 1 large = 1 xlarge. This makes no sense. I consulted my home state guidance on eggs and learned that a dozen "xlarge" eggs average 765g, while a dozen "large" eggs weigh 680g. I guess it makes sense that a natural product doesn’t have to meet a per-egg standard
Minimum Weights for a Dozen Eggs in Wisconsin:
Jumbo eggs ≅ 30 oz / 850g
Extra Large eggs ≈ 27 oz / 765g
Large eggs ≅ 24 oz / 680g
Medium eggs ≅ 21 oz / 595g
I didn’t believe my dry dough would hold together, so I beat another egg and added that to the batter (hard work: not a recommended technique). What would you do in this situation? Add water?
I let this sit in the fridge for an hour because I forgot about it. I then portioned out cookies with my 40-count dipper and baked 14 minutes, yielding 22 cookies.
Verdict: Just on the cusp between chewy and crispy, makes for a gratifying bite. Filling—very oatmeal-y. I was concerned they would be too sweet but not the case, probably due to cocoa and dark chocolate.
Will try the other variations!
* very handy cooking tool, but wicked sharp blades cut my finger when attempted to clean.
Re: Notes from try #1
Date: 2019-04-04 07:48 pm (UTC)The cocoa powder makes for a slightly drier dough, though mine did still hold together. So if you do the chocolate hobnobs again, you can either reduce your rice flour by 20 grams, or add in a little extra oil (like maybe the full 1/2 cup), or some water or milk product. When it's all mixed up, the dough should stick together easily, not crumble. It's also possible you left your oats chunkier than I did, which (along with the chocolate chips) will also contribute to a dough not sticking together.
If you think chunky oats might be the cause, you can change the ratio of oat flour to oats, putting in more oat flour, and fewer chopped oats. Like try 80 grams of oat flour, and 100 grams of chopped oats. When I whirr up the rolled oats in the food processor I always end up with some oats ground into flour along with my larger chunkier pieces.
In other news: The Gluten Free Canteen recipe calls for an extra large egg, so I left that in, but I just use my normal large eggs, maybe--if I remember--picking out the largest from the dozen.
Thanks for the report!
Re: Notes from try #1
Date: 2019-04-05 01:29 am (UTC)I'm proud of myself for writing down everything and not veering too far from the recipe. Science + cookery = success.
Re: Notes from try #1
Date: 2019-04-05 05:48 pm (UTC)Rice-Free Variation!
Date: 2020-03-02 06:10 pm (UTC)So my rice-free version looks like this:
150 grams coarsely chopped rolled oats (1 1/2 cups)
95 grams oat flour (~1 cup)
65 grams cassava flour (~1/2 cup)
150 grams granulated sugar (3/4 cup)
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon baking powder
1 large egg
110 grams neutral vegetable oil (1/2 cup minus two teaspoons) (I used avocado)
1 tablespoon honey or maple syrup (I used honey)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Re: Rice-Free Variation!
Date: 2020-05-16 01:38 am (UTC)