About ten small vanilla and chocolate chip cookies in a resealable 100 g pack, from Kookie Cat — vegan, gluten-free, and made without refined sugar.
What they are made of. Gluten-free oat flakes (24%), cashews (22%), coconut syrup, desiccated coconut, dark chocolate drops (8%), coconut oil, coconut chips, Bourbon vanilla (0.3%) and salt. That is a cookie built on oats and nuts rather than on flour and butter — which is why they are chewier and denser than a conventional biscuit, and why they taste of something.
Real vanilla, and why 0.3% is a lot. Bourbon vanilla — from Madagascar, Réunion and the surrounding islands — is the standard by which vanilla is judged, and it is the third most expensive spice in the world after saffron and cardamom. Every pod is pollinated by hand, because the orchid's natural pollinator does not exist outside Mexico; the technique was worked out in 1841 by Edmond Albius, an enslaved twelve-year-old boy on Réunion, and it is still the method used today. Nearly all industrial “vanilla” flavouring is synthetic vanillin made from wood pulp or petrochemicals. Three parts per thousand of the real thing in a biscuit is a deliberate and expensive decision.
On the gluten-free oats. Oats contain no gluten of their own, but they are so routinely harvested, transported and milled alongside wheat that ordinary oats are unsafe for coeliacs. Certified gluten-free oats are grown and handled in a segregated chain. That certification is the whole reason these can be sold as gluten-free.
The resealable pack is a genuinely practical detail: these are small, and the bag closes, so you are not committed to the whole 100 g at once.
Allergens: cashews and oats. May contain traces of other nuts.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.