As of this week, we’ve added two amazing new olive oil inspired treats to our shelves – Hand-Made Rosemary Olive Oil Crackers and Olive Oil Brownies. Both are absolutely scrumptious and the brownies are gluten free to boot!
We’re excited to be experimenting with how to utilize and highlight our homegrown olive oil as an ingredient in our kitchen. Every new olive oil product we develop means fewer dollars spent and fossil fuels burned in the creation of our kitchen goodies.
The process of making these treats is not easy though. Developing a new product can take an average one to two months, with Chefs Anna and Becky tirelessly trying out subtle modifications of ingredients, ratios, cooking temperatures and more. Our Olive Oil Crackers took at least 10 different bakes, each with slight variations in temperature and time. Chef Anna shared with me about the challenges of translating a delicious dish into a shelf-stable product that can be packaged and sold in Frog Hollow’s Cafe, Farmer’s Markets, CSA and Mail Order channels. It’s easy enough in a small batch to watch over the more complicated parts of the process and lose out on a couple of burned crackers here and there. But with any increase in scale, a couple of burned crackers can turn in to a few dozen. So each cracker is made with a lot of love and attention; hand-rolled, ruler-measured and handbrished with olive oil to finish it.
Similarly our brownies took many trials to perfect. Thanks to the help of our head tasters, Millie and Maddie we were finally able to achieve chocolate greatness. The big challenge with our new gluten free goodies, was to find a way to balance out the strong grassy flavor of the olive oil. But, our eagerness to try our olive oil in something sweet, offered the necessary motivation. In order to balance out the strong flavor of the oil, Chef Becky added three different types of chocolate; melted bittersweet chocolate, chocolate chips and coco powder. Becky chose almond flour to eliminate gluten and because it’s unique texture means it absorbs just the right amount of oil to make the brownies dense and moist without being overly oily. Needless to say, it eventually passed the Maddie and Millie taste test.
We hope you’ll consider trying both of these new treats by adding them on to one of your upcoming boxes.
