A month or two into his bakery job, Sou Saechao sampled what looked like a classic cookie with a twist – flat and wide with crinkly, golden-brown edges, bedazzled with black and white sesame seeds. But one bite, and Saechao realized this cookie was hiding something: the inside was filled with sweetened red bean paste, making it similar to an almost savory treat found in dim sum restaurants.
The combination of lightly nutty and semi-sweet won him over. “I just love red beans, so it was perfect for me,” said Saechao.
The dim sum cookie was dreamed up by Elaine Lau and Samantha Ho, who worked together at Sunday Bakeshop, an Oakland, California, bakery that Lau founded. Since the bakery was inspired by French and Asian American influences, they wanted to create a stuffed cookie that played with the flavors of jian dui, a dessert they’d grown up eating in Asian tea houses in the US. Jian dui are little globes made of glutinous rice flour, filled with bean paste, sprinkled with sesame seeds and deep fried.
“It definitely was a cookie that you either loved or hated,” said Lau. Although some people weren’t used to sweetened bean paste in a dessert, others got it right away. “We actually received a lot or comments about how it was people’s favorite cookie and how they had their parents try it and got the ultimate Asian compliment of ‘not too sweet’.”
News of the cookie spread and was picked up in the San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today. Although the bakery stopped selling the dim sum cookie a few months ago, Lau said they sometimes bring it back on special occasions.
This concoction’s appeal spoke to a certain moment in US baking: multicultural, nostalgic and a little bit out of the box. But it also served as an example of how the simple cookie – a classically American innovation – is introducing new audiences to non-western flavors, be they nutty, savory or even – gasp – spicy.
You might be thinking: what business do soy sauce or chilli paste or bay leaves have being in cookies? In American baking, cookies showcase sweetness: chocolate, sprinkles, caramel. But if you clear enough room in your heart and in your pantry for one extra, unexpected thing, a whole world opens up.
“People were really skeptical. It was as if you’d said the most wild thing in the world,” said Eric Kim, the author of Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home. Last year, he developed a New York Times Cooking recipe for gochujang caramel cookies. Gochujang is a fermented red chilli paste used in Korean cooking – it’s the main sauce in the rice dish bibimbap – but its potential for desserts seemed almost obvious to Kim.
“It’s a trio of spicy, savory and sweet,” said the recipe developer, who notes that hint of sweetness makes it “ready” to use in desserts and that he isn’t the first to experiment with it.
Through the lens of TikTok and social media, Kim has watched as readers across the country overcome their suspicions and fall in love with the gochujang caramel recipe. It’s far and away the most popular recipe he’s ever published; he noted he probably gets mentioned in an Instagram post about the cookies once a day. “There’s that meme of a woman doing this [reaction shot], where you’re like, ‘Do I like this? I don’t know if I like this.’ And then suddenly, ‘Ooh, I do like it.’”
Endlessly customizable, cookies are really the perfect vehicle for experimentation in home kitchens. “It’s like a blank canvas,” said Abi Balingit, author of Mayumu, a Filipino dessert cookbook. “The return on cookies is so much faster” compared with other desserts, said Balingit. “You just bake them, and they’re ready to go in 20 minutes.”
Balingit is the brains behind an adobo chocolate chip cookie, which calls for soy sauce, vinegar and bay leaves to replicate the flavors of adobo, a sauce often used in Filipino dishes. On their own, these ingredients might sound seriously wrong or straight-up gimmicky. But this isn’t a stunt. “It’s a new approach to a cookie recipe you’ve been making your whole life,” said Balingit.
And the viral success of Kim’s gochujang cookie recipe suggests that regardless of initial skepticism, audiences are hungry for more experimentation. “I don’t know that gochujang needed a PR person. I think this cookie was just riding a wave that already existed,” said Kim.
Like Kim, Balingit is pulling flavors from her own life and reinventing them. “You obviously want to make something that is predominantly sweet, that people will recognize as a dessert,” she said. Cookies like Kim’s and Balingit’s are picking up where tahini or miso peanut butter cookies left off and taking things a step further.
But of course, the goal is to find balance. A hint of spice or salt helps draw out flavors that might otherwise get masked by sweetness. “At my panadería, I’m always aiming for that perfect balance of sweet, but not too sweet,” said Teresa Finney of Atlanta-based microbakery At Heart Panadería. To make her roasted strawberry jam stand out, she adds a crack of black pepper. “You don’t really taste the pepper all that much; it just adds a hit of savory that brings out the strawberry flavor,” she said.
While Finney specializes in cakes and conchas (Mexican sweet breads with colorful sugar crusts), she’s dabbled in savory cookies, too. The baker is workshopping a linzer cookie that replaces jam with a mole paste. She also experimented with masa harina – dough made from corn that’s been ground and nixtamalized – in her cakes and cookies at pop-ups earlier this year.
“People kept asking me all day what masa harina was,” said Finney. To describe the taste and consistency, she said: “I usually ask people if they’ve ever eaten a corn tortilla – they usually have – and then tell them masa harina is the flour used in those. Eyes light up when they realize!”
Masa harina holds a special place in Finney’s heart: it’s instant memory. “The smell, the flavor, the texture just instantly takes me back to being a kid at my grandparents’ house and watching my aunts and cousins all make tamales every Christmas Eve,” she said.
At Gusto Bakery in Long Beach, California, owner and baker Arturo Enciso uses masa harina to create breads and pastries that recall traditional flavors and methods used in Mexican cooking. “When I blend the bread dough with this masa dough, they just harmonize,” said Enciso, who got his start as a bread baker. “You get really strong corn aromas, a different chew, so it’s just been fascinating.”
While these new creations are catching on, it may be enough for the bakers who develop them to satisfy an itch they’ve been wanting to scratch. “I identify with corn probably more than I identify with wheat” because it was always a presence in family recipes and meals, said Enciso. “I think I was missing that as a baker.”
English (US)