Havreflarn with 1/2 the Sugar & All the Flavor

9/8/2016

Culinary Curiosity Thursday

Havreflarn
Swedish Oatmeal Crisp Cookies
Makes 2 dozen

Ingredients
1 stick unsalted butter melted 1/2 cup (113 g)
1 cup old fashioned rolled oats (gluten free) (100g)
¼ cup sunflower seeds (30g)
2 tablespoons flaxseed ground (13g)
3 tablespoons+1 ½ teaspoons tapioca flour (23g)
½ cup unrefined cane sugar (82g)
I use Rapunzel sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon raw apple cider vinegar

Method
Preheat oven to 350F 176C
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper
Melt butter and set aside
Grind flax seed and set aside
In a food processor
Grind oatmeal until fine
Add all dry ingredients and process until fine (don’t over do it 5 seconds or so)
Add melted butter and wet ingredients
Pulse 5-6 times until combined.
Measure 1 tablespoon per cookie leaving 2 inches of space between
Bake for 8 minutes
Cool off the cookie sheet
To make them perfectly crisp bake in the dehydrator or oven at 145F 63C
For 1 hour and 15 minutes.

What makes this recipe work?

Spinning the oats, flax and sunflower seeds into a fine meal makes a delicate cookie.
Melting the butter helps the cookie to spread out.
Using unprocessed sugar gives complex caramel notes
Sea salt adds a sweeter flavor
The tablespoon of ACV tricks the tongue to pick up the whole spectrum of flavors and keeps checking back to sweet. You think it’s sweeter because of the slight sour note.
The flaxseed adds cohesiveness and replaces the egg. Eggs adds moisture which I didn't want.
Sunflower seeds add flavor and a wholesome feel.
Tapioca starch helps hold the cookie together and create crunch
Small amount of cinnamon and vanilla help to focus the flavor of the oats and butter.
Returning the cookies to a low heat draws enough moisture out to make a crisp cookie without the excess sugar.

Havreflarn, Swedish oatmeal crisp cookies, a Scandinavian treat you can make any time of the week. Thin, crispy, but with ½ the sugar, gluten-free, and twice the nutrition of the usual recipes.

No matter how long it took I was committed to getting this cookie right! Back in July a woman in FaceBook's Sourdough group mentioned that she makes these cookies gluten free, but she couldn’t track down the recipe. We traded a few comments back and forth, she'd made them with oats and corn flour.
I finally found the cookie’s name, Haverflarn, all I had to go on was that Ikea sells them.
I found several recipes online each of them completely different. This was the one I ended up referring to most often Haverflarn, but mine needed to follow the guidelines for Revisionist Baking

My recipe needed to be thin, crisp...delicious but low in sugar, wheat free, and with more nutrition.

I went through six cookie trials

Before I nailed the recipe. I’ve been at it for two months now, on and off. I wasn’t having trouble with thin, or delicious but crisp was an issue. Usually you rely on sugar and fat content to give a cookie crisp.
Finally, I was drinking tea with a friend and hashing out my cookie troubles with her while we sampled my trials, and a light bulb went on---
Crackers are crisp, and they don’t have any sugar, so maybe if I bake the cookies, and then crisp them at a low temperature? And it worked wonderfully.
I baked the cookies at 350F for 8 minutes and then put them in the dehydrator at 145F for an hour and 15 minutes. Perfectly crisp. I’ve kept our baked cookies in the freezer to retain freshness, since we don’t go through sweets quickly, this is a new trick for me.
With Love Enjoy!