Enjoy Life Crunchy Cookies

I received samples of the four new crunchy cookies from Enjoy Life Foods and I am in deep trouble – they ALL are *way* too good.

The four new flavors are: chocolate chip, double chocolate chip, sugar crisp, vanilla honey graham. They are still all top eight allergen free; however they have changed the base flours for this kind of cookie – they’re using millet, buckwheat and rice. There is no information about these flours yet on their website so this is what I was told by Enjoy Life Foods:

The new flours we are using are sourced from a mill that only handles gluten-free, top-8 allergen-free flours. The mill originally was established to be organic only, but they recognized that gluten-free was a big opportunity and built a brand new mill next to their original mill. The new mill has a separate warehouse, packaging facilities and storage – in essence, an entirely new plant was built just for the GF flours.

What we really love about this mill is the high quality of the ingredients, the fineness of the flour, and their high-level of customer-centeredness. They know how important it is to maintain their allergen-free status and were GFCO certified even before we started buying from them.. Our CEO, Scott Mandell, visited them in the fall and was pleased with what he saw.

They test their ingredients before they mill them and when we receive a new shipment we run tests in our own QA lab. Depending on the risk level of the ingredient, we can run internal tests on any of the top 8. We always run gluten tests on every ingredient we receive in house, regardless of any other test we are running. Ingredients are kept on hold until we can verify that they are safe to eat. When we don’t like a result, we will use third party testing. We always keep samples from every lot of ingredients we receive – no matter how messy. If we do get reports of a reaction, we can go back not only to the ingredients that were used in a product, but finished samples from the lot in question.

Most of our new flours are organic, as the mill specializes in sourcing organic flours. We have started using their sorghum, buckwheat, and millet flours, and hope to add rice in the future.


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Now on to the new Enjoy Life Foods crunchy cookie flavors. Bottom line: they are *all* good; so what I have to say really is picking nits. But yes, I have my favorites and the two that to me are the most successful in terms of looks, tastes texture (and after-taste or lack of) are: sugar crisp and double chocolate chip - sugar crisp has the slight edge.

The sugar crisp reminds me of Pillsbury sugar cookie dough. They are slightly chewy in the center, at least my batch was, and the flavor was exactly right to me: overly sweet, and buttery - just what you want in a sugar cookie. Quite irresistible. I’ve already taste tested half the box. And I can envision some ice cream scoops in between two cookies refrozen and served for dessert during the summer months. Or next week.

The double chocolate chip has a deep chocolate flavor with a truly crunchy, crisp texture – these would be great crumbled up and used a cookie crust for some allergen-free pie.

I found the chocolate chip pretty darn good just not as crave-able.

The vanilla honey graham is the least successful flavor wise. The honey natural flavor is off (not very honey-ish and odd), and there is no detectable graham taste. So it falls in this nether world of neither a honey cookie nor a true graham nor for that matter vanilla. I asked if this was the final formulation and was told yes. (I think they still need some tinkering.)

So, when I go into the store, I will be buying (read: hoarding) the sugar crisps. Taste is however so *extremely relative*, so I say try them all and find your favorite as they are all top eight allergen free and pretty darn yum – how sweet is that?

Thank you Enjoy Life Foods for creating another set of winning products that are safe for all of us!