The good: I have made about 15 recipes from this book so far.All ranged from "good" to "excellent", a very respectable turnout.Not a single one was unpleasantly tough, dry, or otherwise failed.They compare VERY favorably with other lowfat cookies I have tried.I will definitely be making some again, and trying others. My personal favorites were apricot almond streusel squares, `gourmet' variation of the chocolate chip cookies, pecan pie squares, crunchy peanut cookies, and cornmeal maple pecan twists.
In general, the recipes in this book are reliable, tasty and have significantly reduced fat (especially saturated fat) as compared with comparable `regular' cookies.E.g., in a typical ~ 2 cup flour recipe, there is usually ~4 T butter here as opposed to 1-2 sticks, and egg yolks are usually reduced or eliminated. The changes do reduce overall dough volume and yield a smaller batch size, which in my opinion is all to the good.(If you're buying a reduced-fat cookie cookbook, chances are you don't want 5 dozen extra cookies lying around every time you head to the kitchen to try a new recipe).
Other pluses: these recipes use familiar, inexpensive and natural ingredients that you already have on hand or can easily find: no weird or artificial diet substitutes.Unlike most low-fat recipes, these cookies are portioned normally and even generously; there is no artificial lowering of the fat content by instructing you to fashion micro-cookies of which you would have to eat 10 to equal one normal cookie.In fact, in several recipes I ended up with more cookies than the listed yield, which almost never happens to me.
This book also seems like a labor of love-- the recipes are unusually well-tested and fine tuned. The instructions are clear, careful and include useful details, like tips on how to reduce the number of dishes you dirty in the preparation.The book belies its small size with lots of helpful or interesting marginal notes and voluminous recipe variations, many of which yield genuinely different recipes (not just something obvious like substitute one variety of raisin for another). You'll find a wonderful diversity of cookie flavors, textures and styles and familar standbys as well as unique recipes of the author's own creation.
The bad:First, I found a few baking times to be off, in particular, too long (my only general `recipe testing' complaint). The author is good about providing other done-ness cues, but I'd recommend you start checking cookies much earlier than indicated.
Second, although these recipes are very good, there were some clear `consequences' of reducing the fat.Several cookies had telltale textural issues such as being soft and cakey instead of tender-chewy, or being hard-crunchy instead of tender-crunchy.Also, almost all became stale frustratingly quickly, in several cases, within a few hours.Some took well to refreshing, freezing, storing unbaked dough to bake off as needed, etc., but I had to figure this out on my own.Given the pervasiveness of the premature staling problem, I would really have appreciated more attention to storage advice and/or strategies - no one wants to end up throwing out most of one's labors away.
Finally, the philosophy of this book is very much of a mid-nineties `reduce fat and who cares about anything else' style, and that philosophy, as most people would now acknowledge, suffered from some major nutritional flaws.Again, the recipes do succeed, and admirably, on satisfying the criteria they set out to satisfy (they are lower fat, and they taste good-- no mean feat).However, if you flip through the nutritional information handily accompanying each recipe, you may notice that many of these cookies are very high in refined carbohydrates and calories. Many of the bars, especially, hover around the mark of 200 calories EACH (and some even more)-- that's a lot. And of course you're not going to eat just one.Morever, many recipe variations are rather decadent (calling for additions of things like nuts, chocolate chips and caramel), with added fat but no added calorie information.I find all this to be off-putting in a book that promises `healthy alternatives that can be eaten without guilt.'
In fact, a number of these recipes seem to have nearly the same total calories as the `standard' version whose fat has not been assiduously reduced. In such cases, you're not so much saving calories as you are exchanging them--by and large, fats for simple carbohydrates.Arguably, this is a trade for the worse, as it increases the "empty calorie" count of your treat and decreases the satiety that fats provide. Then there are the losses that come along with the fat for simple-carb trade--e.g., lower-fat cookies go stale much faster and without the fat, they can taste too sweet.In many cases the new cookies, while still very good, are obviously missing elements of the old standbys.If you slash the amount of chocolate chips in a chocolate chip cookie or the amount of nuts in a Russian tea cake, you can tell that those elements are missing, however appealing the new versions may be on their own terms. This, in combination with a belief that the new cookies are `healthier' (and are going to be stale tomorrow) can lead us to eat an extra cookie or two and thus end up with more calories than if we'd just stuck with the family recipe from the 50's.
I'll now remove my party-pooper hat and reiterate that the author has succeeded in producing a book of wonderful-tasting, diverse and easy cookies with less fat.The book is absolutely in the top tier of the low-fat dessert cookbook family.If you are selective, you can also find many tasty choices that are not JUST reduced fat, but also sport an impressive nutritional profile for dessert.And the book is generally a pleasure to cook and read from. So, I give it 4 stars because it mostly delivers on what it promises.Just don't expect the recipes be nutritional miracles.
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One Smart Cookie: All Your Favorite Cookies, Squares, Brownies and Biscotti ... With Less Fat! (Paperback)
I am a nutritionist and personal trainer and I am giving this book to every one of my clients!Finally someone has put it all together-Dr. Schwarzbein explains in detail the steps to getting healthy(diet, tapering off toxic chemicals, handling stress and getting sleep, exercise and hormones).As an exercise physiologist I really appreciate the innovative way she has prescribes exercise.She also explains how you must be healthy to lose weight and NOT vice versa-if you follow this book's plan you will be able to be your healthiest ever, and more importantly, you will be able to maintain it. This is one you will read, highlight and reread!
