I've been working my way through the stash of rye flour in my freezer that I accumulated before the pandemic, which is why I decided to try Sarah Kieffer's recipe for "Raspberry Rye Cookies" from 100 Cookies. Like Kieffer's Strawberry Crème Fraîche Bars, these cookies include both fresh fruit and freeze-dried berries.
To make the dough, you beat softened butter with granulated sugar and brown sugar until light and fluffy; add an egg, egg yolk, and vanilla; and mix in the dry ingredients (ground freeze-dried raspberries, all-purpose flour, rye flour, baking soda, and salt). The recipe instructs you to form the dough into balls, "rolling a raspberry or two into each cookie as you do so." I always use a scoop to portion out my cookies and I experimented with a few ways to incorporate the fresh berries into the cookies without causing the delicate fruit to disintegrate during the process. Finally, I settled on tossing a raspberry into the empty bowl of the scoop before scooping out the dough, thereby ending up with a single raspberry embedded on top of each cookie. I used a #30 scoop and got 29 cookies from a batch of dough.
The cookies became quite flat during baking, and they were oddly sallow. The photo in the cookbook shows a rather pale cookie, so the strange color wasn't too surprising -- but I definitely prefer a nice golden brown cookie. As I was transferring the cookies from the pan to a rack to cool, I noticed a problem. I had washed the raspberries before using them and did my best to dry them with paper towels before adding them to the dough. But the physical shape of a raspberry is perfect for retaining water, and raspberries also release a lot of juice when they are crushed (like when the berries are forced up against stiff dough in the cookie scoop). I noticed that there were small wet spots in the centers of the cookies that were clearly originating from the fruit. They are somewhat difficult to see in the photo above, but each cookie had a dark spot in the middle created from from excess moisture. These wet spots extended through the entire cookie and were visible on the bottom as well.
The mere fact that the center of the cookie was damp would not necessarily have bothered me that much except that the centers were bendy and the cookies therefore required special handling. Even when they were totally cool, I had to be quite careful moving the cookies around and trying to stack them in boxes to get them to my tasters. I ended up using wax paper to separate cookies stacked on top of each other. The cookies were chewy throughout and I found the damp centers to be unpleasant. I found that storing the cookies in the fridge caused the centers to firm up nicely and improved the texture considerably.
These cookies had an easily identifiable berry flavor and while I found the background flavor of the cookie slightly odd (I am generally not a fan of the earthy flavor of rye), my tasters were very enthusiastic about this cookie and gave it high marks. If I ever make these again, I think that I would just skip the fresh raspberries add maybe add an extra sprinkle of ground or crushed freeze-dried raspberries on
top of each cookie before baking. I think I was the outlier in finding this cookie to be just so-so.
Recipe: "Raspberry Rye Cookies" from 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer.
Comments