Have you ever done an internet search for "vegan biscotti"? Not at lot out there, is there? We've searched six ways to Sunday to find a recipe, but mostly we find a lot of people lamenting that there are no good vegan biscotti recipes.
We've been experimenting a bit, trying recipes for biscotti from a variety of vegan cookbooks, plus we've tried applying the techniques we found in those cookbooks as a means of veganizing our favorite biscotti recipes. Those recipes involved substituting most or all of the egg with applesauce, but none of them resulted in a biscotti recipe we felt good about posting.
Today we took matters into our own hands and came up with a vegan biscotti that is awfully damned good. The original recipe is Cranberry-Chocolate Chip Biscotti, which comes from the Cooking Light Complete Cookbook. We substituted two eggs' worth of whizzed up tofu plus one egg equivalent of strained applesauce for the three eggs called for in the original. Plus, we added a bit of water and one tablespoon of oil to make up for the fat and moisture lost by the omission of the eggs. This method is certainly the best we've tried so far, and we'll be applying it to our favorite biscotti recipe of all time, so stay tuned. We'll post that recipe once we have fine tuned it.
Ingredients
- 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries
- 1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons canola oil
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract (the original recipe calls for one teaspoon vanilla plus one teaspoon almond extract, but we went with straight vanilla in the extract department)
- 1/2 cup silken tofu, whizzed up in a food processor (use the shelf-stable, boxed tofu you find on the grocery shelves, usually near the Asian foods)
- 1/4 cup strained unsweetened applesauce (use a fine mesh strainer - we didn't bother with a paper towel or cheesecloth, just the strainer was fine)
- 4 tablespoons water, or enough to give your dough the proper consistency
Steps
- Preheat oven to 350.
- Lightly spray a baking sheet with non-stick spray.
- Combine flour, sugar, cranberries, chocolate chips, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.
- In a food processor, process tofu, applesauce, oil, and vanilla extract until smooth and combined. Add to dry ingredients.
- Stir until well blended; dough will be dry and crumbly.
- Turn dough onto a lightly floured board and knead lightly seven or eight times. (This is the point at which we added the extra water because we couldn't get the dough to come together. We didn't knead the dough on the board, we just kind of mushed it together in the bowl)
- Divide the dough in half, and place on the prepared baking sheet. Form the dough into a log about eight-inches long, and leave a decent amount of space between the two logs. Pat the dough down to about one-inch thickness.
- Bake at 350 for 35 minutes (this was too long for us - next time we'll bake them for only 30 minutes). Remove baking sheet from oven, reduce oven to 325. Remove logs to a wire rack and cool for 10 minutes.
- Cut each log on the diagonal into 15 or so 1/2 inch slices. Put the biscotti back in the oven, cut side down, for 10 minutes. Take the sheet out, flip the biscotti onto the other cut side, and return to the oven for an additional 10 minutes. Cookies will be slightly soft in the center but will harden as they cool.
- After the second baking (or third, depending on how you look at it), remove the cookies to a wire rack until completely cool.
- These will last a good long time on the kitchen counter in an air-tight container, but you probably won't be able to resist them, and you'll be brewing up a pot of hot coffee or tea just to have one, or ten. They're also really good dipped into your milk beverage of choice.
