STONE COOKIES Taste Test & Recipe | HARD TIMES - food from times of scarcity

Greetings my beautiful beauties, it's an Emmy, welcome back. Today's video is sponsored by hellofresh, the

food

delivery service that brings

food

right to your doorstep. Get eight free meals with $80 off your first month by heading to hell again easy and using code me-80 big. thanks to hella's new answer in this video, today I'm going to explore a rock cookie

recipe

for tough

times

. Good morning, it's 7:30 and we're headed to the airport, but we had to stop by the Mountain View bakery to shop. their famous

stone

cookie, they have been made since 1936 during the Great Depression and are an island favorite now they are called

stone

cookies

because as you can imagine they are

hard

as rocks so I found a

recipe

to make these

cookies

in Honolulu . star advertiser and I'll put the link below, that's the recipe I'm going to use and try today and do a little

taste

test

in comparison.

What I found interesting about this recipe is that there is no butter and there is no refined white sugar because they were

hard

to find so instead we will use unrefined cane sugar and we will use shortening so I am excited to do the little comparison of Taste

test

, but before I make the cookies, I'm going to open them up so I can visually see what they look like. I'm not going to try them yet. I'm going to try them together, but I want to visually see what they look like so I can emulate them when we're making our homemade version.

OMG, these are so big. Look at them as if the bag were just a layer of cookies. I think there are maybe a dozen cookies in here and they were about seven dollars a bag, so this is the original. I have coconut and cinnamon, but we'll do that comparison later, so look at the size of these cookies, they're huge, huge. I love its irregular shape; They are a little oblong, but they are all a little different. Look where they were probably touching each other on the baking sheet and they are very hard. It sounds like two pieces of wood colliding or something incredibly hard, so I haven't tried them yet.

I'm going to wait until I bake my version first and then do a little comparison, but now I know how dark they should be when I bake them today, so in a large bowl we'll start combining our ingredients for our stone cookie, first we'll add four cups of bread flour and now bread. the flour has a little more protein than typical all-purpose flour, let me get a spatula, okay, 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar, then we'll add 1/2 cup shortening, a cup of turbinado or cane sugar unrefined, a beautiful brown color. to that teaspoon and a quarter of salt that I'm going to use in this, so this is Elias sea salt, it's from the Diamond Aloha Salt Company brand, so a teaspoon of a quarter, quarter, half, look at that beautiful mixture of pink colour. this together until it's nice and fluffy, we're going to plug it in, we're going to turn it off and then we're going to plug it in because it doesn't work without electricity, right, it needs power, okay, let's try it again, here we go.

We will take a third of a cup of evaporated milk and add an egg. Wow, that was a great sound. A teaspoon of vanilla. Actually, next we're going to add two teaspoons of baking soda that's going to combine with the cream of tartar. It will make our cookies rise a little. Now we will add our milk mixture and then mix this until it forms a dough. Okay, this looks pretty dry. Let's see what happens if we use our impeccably clean hands to form a dough. It seems quite dry, although if we crush it, it comes together.

I'm going to go ahead and add an extra tablespoon of milk, two extra tablespoons of milk to have a baking sheet lined with a little bit of silicone mat, pinch it a little bit. The dough says to be the size of a golf ball and then flatten it to 3/8 inch. I'm going to make mine a little bigger than the recipe because I want them to look more like the ones we have. I'm going to do a

taste

test to see if they are this big, they already look drier and more brittle. I'm a little skeptical about this recipe and then we'll bake them in a 325 degree oven for 25 minutes or until they're nicely browned. and strong, while my cookies are baking, let me tell you a little more about Hella Fresh so Hella Fresh brings pre-measured seasonal ingredients straight to your door and includes simple recipes.

In six steps, you can prepare a meal that comes together in 30 minutes. So Hella Fresh is now $6.99 per serving and you can switch between classic or family vegetarian meals this week. My family really enjoyed the sweet potato and poblano quesadillas, really easy to make and I love the fact that the recipes are designed for you with minimal pots so cleanup is really quick and easy so start with eight free meals that are $80 off your first month of hella fresh, head to hell again, calm down and use code me-80. Many thanks to hell of Fresh for sponsoring this video.

Check our cookies, so my cookies are out of the oven. I'm letting them cool completely, so I have some water ready to boil back here because now I'm going to make myself a cup of coffee. This is a liar 100% Kona coffee. This is probably the most recognizable Hawaiian coffee brand you will see when you go to Hawaii. I ground the beans in my little grinder here. I have a cup here and my broken hand looks spilled. that push runs your fan all the way. I mean, it works fine, so why do I need another one? Well, a big spoonful of that in my filter.

I have read that these cookies can be eaten without some type of drink, but you can. I'm potentially really going to break a tooth so I'm going to go get a drink so while my coffee continues to drip let's open up the second bag of snow cookies I bought and this one is the coconut cinnamon one these are equally big and it looks like the cinnamon one and Actually, the coconut is in the cookie. They don't look like they're sprinkled at all, so I think the flavor is in the cookie itself, so it's pretty indistinguishable. They look very, very similar.

Now let me show you the homemade version. Wow, not now. They look nothing like the originals, they have a much more crumbly texture on the surface, so the recipe said that if you want a glass or finish on your cookies, you should paint them with a layer of milk, which I did here and you can see that it is so. They have a glossy finish, while these have a matte type finish, these look nothing like the original. I also baked them about 10 or 15 minutes longer because I really want to develop this nice brown color, so they browned nicely, although the bottom started to darken a little more quickly, so I've let them cool because I want them to be really hard and They sound tough but they don't look like the original, they look more like oatmeal cookies so finally try these cookies first I'm going to take a sip of coffee because I can't stand it mm-hmm delicious cup of coffee nice and bitter not too acidic at all bitter quite soft rich with a lot of body mmm that's fine, let's try the original stone cookie first I'm going to give it a break this is what it looks like inside and how it sounds very strong it smells very delicious it smells a little bit like a cookie cookies like those from Marie cookie or those round Goya cookies very similar to the vanilla smell, okay, let's take a small bite of this without anything first mmm, very simple cookie, quite sweet and actually not as hard as I expected, but nothing more difficult than say a biscotti, it has a slightly different texture than a biscotti.

For me it has to have a thicker crunch, it's a little rougher, like big chunks of rock, while this one crumbles a little in the mouth mm-hmm, it's actually not very hard at all, the taste is very similar to a sweet vanilla flavored fortune cookie, a different texture but a similar type of flavor profile, yet the cookies are not as hard. I've actually had crackers at German MREs that are harder than these, so they're great mm-hmm, a very simple one. little cookie now let's dip it in coffee mmm oh yeah, that's particularly delicious with black coffee because they're sweetened, you dip it in there and you have the coffee soaked in the cookie, which works really well, so it sweetens it, you have a little bit of that vanilla flavor there wonderful mm-hmm cookies and coffee or tea just wonderful so now let's compare that with the homemade version let's do the crunch test first ooh so immediately different color these are much blonder in the middle these are much darker in the middle crispy on the outside but not that crispy hmm pretty good crunchy on that but it's really different this one is ours actually much saltier although they probably contain salt you don't really notice them these are noticeably salty and in terms of flavor , I'd say it's actually quite similar.

Again, the very basic vanilla cookie flavor definitely tastes a little nuttier and toastier. I baked it longer than called for in the recipe. There are some similarities with the homemade one. original in terms of the texture of the crumb it has that type of fine Enis crumble but superficially it doesn't look anything like the original I think there may be a typo in the recipe or maybe I did something wrong but it can't be seen I really like it inside or outside, but the middle still has a kind of cookie-like texture in the middle, not quite hard like this one, but I like the original stone cookies.

I like his humility. I like its simplicity. I love the look of it, that was original, let's try the coconut with cinnamon, now this one was already broken, so the same kind of crumbly texture and big crunches as the original hmm oh, I like it, let's dip it with hmm, what I really like with coffee, that's great, there's a nice little coconut. Enos there is a hint of cinnamon but not enough to overpower anything, just a little coconut kiss really like that, in fact now with the addition of coconut and cinnamon it tastes a little more like those Malaysian butter coconut cookies, Oh, I love them. ok, but the coconut flavor isn't as strong as those cookies, those can be a little overpowering, almost like you're tasting the suntan lotion or something.

This doesn't taste like that, it tastes more like desiccated coconut. more natural and then just a little bit of cinnamon as if you were eating cinnamon toast or something delicious of both I think it would be a good turn for me I like them both I love the humility the humility of these cookies Look at them, their great solidity, they are great, especially with a nice hot cup of coffee, so there you have it, Mountain View Stone Cookies from the Big Island of Hawaii and as always, I'll put links below. In case you want to know more about these cookies, thank you all very much for seeing important things.

A new answer in this video. Get started with eight free meals, with $80 off your first month of hellofresh, by going to hellofresh comm and using the code yo. -80 thanks again for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned something, please share this video with your friends, follow me on social media, like this video, subscribe and see you in the next one until we take care of ourselves.