What We’re Cooking This Week: Whole Wheat Semolina Cookies

Humans evolved to love sugar. Sweetness tells us we’re eating an energy-boosting simple carbohydrate—very handy back in the days before nutritional labels, when you had to bite into that thing you plucked from a thorny vine to see if it was good or if it might kill you. If it was sweet it was usually safe.

These days the stuff is everywhere. Sugar has a long history of human misery and economic exploitation, but given its inherent ability to induce desire in humans, it is unlikely we could have avoided the ubiquitous chronic health issues—obesity, diabetes and cognitive decline—associated with eating too much sugar.

But I like a little something sweet every now and then, and I tell myself it’s fine since I eat mostly beans and cabbage. And making a little treat myself reinforces the rationalization of sugar consumption. We can agree that sugar’s evil, but just a bit mixed together thoughtfully with more wholesome ingredients can produce a few bites that bring a little pleasure into your life. I’ll always eat the cookie.

I’m a lazy baker, so I love how I can make this cookie dough in a food processor. It makes enough that I can bake a dozen cookies and store the rest to make more after I’ve eaten the first batch. A real baker told me years ago that almost every kind of dough needs to rest, so the cookies get better later.

Semolina, the high-protein, high-gluten flour made from durum wheat, gives the cookies a nice, custardy texture, and the whole wheat adds a hint of healthfulness. The finished cookies are small, too, so it’s easy to justify eating five or six.

Recipe

1½ cups whole wheat flour

1½ cups semolina

1½ cups sugar

2½ teaspoons baking powder

1¼ teaspoons kosher-style sea salt

8 ounces unsalted butter, 2 sticks, cut into chunks

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 egg

Combine the flour, semolina, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a food processor and blitz a few time. Add the butter and pulse untl combined, then add the egg and vanilla and blitz again. Transfer to a bowl or container and let the dough rest in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.

Use a 1 or 1 ½ inch cookie scoop to portion out the dough, but use your fingers to pack the scoops into roundish balls maybe a little smaller than golf balls. Arrange on a sheet about 3 inches apart. Bake at 375F for 10-15 minutes, on the short side if you like cookies soft and chewy, longer for a more crispy bottom. Let the cookies cool on the pan for 10 minutes or so, then transfer to a cooling rack.