The Global Cookie Jar

Nobody manufactures a chocolate-chip or cream-filled-sandwich cookie better than the U.S. cookie industry. And nobody appreciates that excellence more than the American cookie consumer, who, in 2003, helped Nabisco's Oreo and Chips Ahoy!, as well as Keebler's Chips Deluxe, rake in a full 25% of the cookie category's annual take, making these the nation's top-selling brands another year running, according to Information Resources, Inc., Chicago. So why should cookie manufacturers stray from the chocolate chippers and cream sandwiches they do best?

Because of biscotti. It seems like only yesterday that we wrote off the dried-out wedges as Italy's scheme for selling burnt toast to naïve Yanks. But nowadays, many wouldn't dream of leaving a coffee shop without one to dunk in a double-decaf soymilk latte. And biscotti aren't alone: The bakery case at my local coffeehouse now carries as many madeleines, Russian teacakes, and oat-filled Australian Anzac biscuits as it does peanut butter cookies and snickerdoodles. In supermarkets, too, imports from the likes of France, Germany and Britain make strong showings alongside our homegrown brands, suggesting that American consumers might welcome increasing cookie immigration quotas.

Cookies the American way

But will they welcome the Marie? The American cookie has evolved into an icon of richness that reflects the land of plenty. That evolution reaches its apex in the typical food-court bakeshop cookie: an indulgence the size of a dinner plate that's so sweet and chewy -- and so packed with nuts, chips and candies -- that we can't wait until the oven timer stops before we sink our teeth into one. When the average American dreams about cookies, this is what they see.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world doesn't dream about "cookies," it dreams about "biscuits." And when it does, it sees a thin, round disc called a Marie (or a Maria, if you speak Spanish). Along with its siblings the Osborne, the caraway-scented Abernethy, France's golden-edged petit beurré and the deceptively named Rich Tea (which isn't very rich and contains no tea), the Marie counts itself among a class of "hard, sweet biscuits" that, to much of the world, personify the cookie -- or, rather, the biscuit -- in its purest form.

But not to us. While immigration may have widened its profile a little, "a few years ago, if you'd asked an American what a Marie is, I'd think maybe one in 100 would know," says Jeffrey A. Zeak, pilot plant manager, American Institute of Baking (AIB), Manhattan, KS. But if you posed the question to Hispanics, Europeans or South Asians, "they would know straightaway." It's a telling lesson, he says, in the disconnect between "what we as Americans know as cookies and what other peoples of the world know as cookies."

The differences are striking when comparing formulations. A typical Marie contains about 21% sugar and 16% fat on a flour-weight basis. No wonder that it tastes more like an animal cracker than a "proper" cookie. By contrast, one of our own chocolate-chip cookies, and not necessarily a premium one, might pack 52% sugar and 48% fat. This doesn't surprise Zeak. "Traditionally, cookies from other parts of the world are leaner in formula -- much lower in fat and sugar than what we're used to," he says. "A high use of sugar is definitely an American thing." In fact, the chief complaint he hears from international colleagues who visit the AIB is that "American baked goods are way too sweet."

They're also much softer -- again unlike a Marie, which doesn't just taste like an animal cracker, but is also flat and crisp like one, too. "It's processed very much like you would process a cracker," Zeak continues, with its dough temperature rising upward of 100?F during mixing, and the cookies rotary-cut on a sheeting line. And because a hard, sweet-biscuit dough develops more gluten than a fat- and sugar-rich dough for a wire-cut cookie, manufacturers often supplement the formula with sodium metabisulphite to reduce the disulphide groups in the gluten network and reign in the dough's springiness.

So good we baked it twice

A nation weaned on jumbo chocolate chips and co-extruded soft-center cookies may have a hard time swallowing a hard, sweet biscuit like the Marie. But then how do you explain our enthusiastic embrace of biscotti -- hardly a soft sweet biscuit?

A biscotti, like its cousins zwieback, mandelbrot and the British rusk, undergoes a dual-baking procedure that originated in ancient times to intentionally rob the biscuit of its moisture. To recreate that process, Zeak says, manufacturers first use a depositer to extrude chubs of dough onto sheet pans that go into the oven for the first bake. "There might be larger operations that use band ovens," he explains, but "for the most part, biscotti are done on an intermediate scale in rack ovens." Once the loaves have finished their initial bake, manufacturers remove them from the oven for slicing, perhaps in a standard bread slicer that they've modified to produce a thicker, biscotti-appropriate wedge. Then, they pop the slices back into the oven for a longer time at a much lower temperature, driving off that last bit of moisture and giving the cookies their crunch.

They're a far cry from the gooey bakeshop ideal, but so long as we have something sweet and liquidy in which to soften our biscotti, we give them our endorsement. So, too, do manufacturers, says Zeak, who love the product from a shelf-life standpoint. "They can just sit in the jar in the coffee house for a while, provided they don't start to pick up moisture and go soggy on you" -- a fate that proper storage and packaging prevent on the consumer's end, but that sound product design can preempt upfront.

For example, in response to the clamor for low-carbohydrate baked goods, Bonnie Gorder-Hinchey, director of culinary services at the Hazelnut Council, Seattle, has experimented with swapping some of the wheat flour in a biscotti formula for ground hazelnut meal, available as a free-flowing flour ground to a particle size of 2 mm. The results, she says, have been impressive. In addition to lending the cookies an earthy, hazelnut flavor, the meal doesn't absorb moisture from the air. "You can't completely eliminate the flour," she cautions, as "you need something to hold the dough together, and flour provides the gluten structure to bind the biscotti." But replacing anywhere from 25% to 75% of the wheat flour with the nut meal has led to success.