I’m a King Arthur Flour kinda’ girl. That preference goes back to my middle school days when my father admitted that his mother – a cook’s cook – always baked with KAF flour. Their white flour was unbleached, he explained, unlike other brands that could be found on supermarket shelves. White was the only option in those days, so unbleached white got the nod from dad and grandma.
These days I have all types of flour: whole wheat, white whole wheat and three different types of rye. They’re all King Arthur Flours. A few months ago, however, my husband called me from a local overstock store to say that he’d seen bags of Bob’s Red Mill whole wheat flour on the shelves and did I want any? At the time I was looking for the whole wheatiest of whole wheat flours and wondered if Bob’s Red Mill had something that was coarser ground that King Arthur. I said, yeah, bring me home a five-pound bag.
You Troublemaker, YouIt turns out that this whole wheat flour looked exactly the same as the equivalent King Arthur brand. So much for that comparison! Now what was I going to do with all that whole wheat flour? Bake with it, of course. I examined the bag (sturdier than the KAF bag, which regularly rips whenever I try to open it) and noticed some interesting recipes. The Oregon Trail cookies looked interesting and very whole-wheaty of their own accord. In addition to straight whole wheat flour the recipe also included oats, dried fruit, nuts and seeds. Very hippy-dippy in a quintessentially 1970s way. I’ve always associated Bob’s Red Mill with the 1970s natural foods movement, with dashikis and Birkenstocks and a weird kick my mother went on around that time. She (we) had the misfortune of reading a natural foods book by Adelle Davis and decided to throw out all the processed food in our house. We started to make our own yogurt and drove out to the country to buy raw milk. My parents got into regular arguments over food. I still remember one fight over Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice Cocktail. Did we notice that the first ingredient was water, my mother argued, and that the beverage was made from a concentrate? OMG, horrors! The food was good. The arguments were not. I hated Adelle Davis. I would have hated Bob’s Red Mill if it had been around during that time. I’m sure it was inspired by the natural foods movement, though. Don’t get me wrong: I respect the brand and regularly stock up on Red Mill hot and cold cereals and specialty flours. I had no qualms about buying the whole wheat flour, even though I really didn’t need it. I was just curious to see how it stacked up to King Arthur Flour.
I decided to give the cookies a shot, even though I had some qualms. I’m not the world’s greatest fan of all-natural baked goods. They usually leave a lot to be desired. I’m open to experimentation, though, so decided to give it a go. And, they contained peanut butter. Who could argue with that?
The problems started almost immediately. The only liquids were 1/4 cup of peanut butter, which is not that liquid, and one egg. These had to stand up to whole wheat flour, oats, nuts, seeds and dried fruit. I remember staring at the not-quite-a-batter as is twirled around and around the bottom of my stand mixer. I stopped the mixer from time to time to see if I could squeeze it into a cohesive mass with my hands. My success rate with that was about 50%. I could see that a lot of the mix-ins were going to stay in the bowl and go out with the trash. I scooped up the crumbly mass and pressed it together as best I could before I rolled it into balls and placed them on a baking sheet. The cookie dough split as I carefully flattened each roll out. A few odds and end twinkled out onto the cookie sheet as I pressed. This did not bode well.
But, what the heck. It was just flour and a handful of other, more exotic ingredients. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they joined their seedy brethren in the trash. I expected a dry, tasteless cookie anyway. Maybe the honey whole wheat bread recipe which was also on the bag would bring me better luck. I slid the cookie trays into the oven and hoped for the best.
DoubtfulBut Bob proved me wrong. The cookies were delicious! They were soft (I have no idea how that happened) and just sweet enough. The dried fruit added the perfect counterpoint to the chewy oats and the nuts and seeds brought things to the next level, making the cookies both soft as well as crunchy at the same time. I gobbled a bunch of them down then packed up the rest and took them downstairs to the freezer.
I’m definitely making these cookies again, although I’ll moisten the batter with a few splashes of water so things hold together. Dried fruit, nuts and seeds are expensive as well as tasty and we can’t go around wasting those. I urge you to give these delightful morsels a try!
Here’s the recipe: https://www.bobsredmill.com/recipes/how-to-make/oregon-trail-cookies
Don’t mind me, I’m eating some cookies.