Aqua Fava Carob Pieces (Vegan, Gluten and Oil Free)

Though I’ve gotten a lot less fussy (or maybe lazy) in my cooking habits, from time to time I still can’t resist my proclivity for vegan adaptations of things I know I should never eat in their original form. This experiment is that a couple times over, since most of you can eat a few chocolate chips in your cookies or pancakes or banana bread now and then, even if it is gluten or fat free. But for me, the theobromine in chocolate is just not worth it, unless I am willing to find myself with the nerves in my legs twitching away into the wee hours of the morning when I’d rather be sleeping and just dreaming of eating chocolate without the side effects.

As most of you know, I actually love carob. So why not just buy carob chips? Because they, too, are manufactured with yet another ingredient Dr. Swank advised those of us with MS to avoid: palm oil.  While palm oil doesn’t give me twitchy legs, it does give me–ahem–GAS. Like it or not, I’ve had to learn to heed the reasons why it’s on Dr. Swank’s “forbidden” list.

Now I know some folks may think the science behind Dr. Swank’s diet is outdated, but for me, any significant foray into coconut oil, palm oil, or chocolate does all the things he says it might do to those of us with MS–it slows down my already sluggish circulation, and I feel weak and generally terrible. Keep at it long enough and my MS symptoms become more pronounced. Those symptoms remind me I am setting the stage to allow oxidization where my circulatory system doesn’t need it and from there potential further deterioration of the myelin on my nerve sheaths I am trying to preserve.

(On a wider wackier note, I also feel a certain solidarity with Lily Tomlin’s character Frankie of Grace and Frankie in her tirade on the environmental evils of palm oil;  it’s a serious issue, despite the comedy, and I get to be automatically righteous simply because I personally can’t tolerate it.)

Thus, I live in a world with no baking chips–chocolate or carob–and once in a while I feel kind of sad about that, kind of sorry for myself, which then always makes me laugh, it’s such a ridiculous thing to feel sorry for myself about, privileged that I am to still be walking around, talking, swallowing and even drawing and writing now and then after 20+ years of living with MS.

That’s when the mad alchemist-cook in me rises up, determined to find a way to make a baking chip or carob piece that will hold together just long enough to get into some cookie batter and melt there. And, I am pleased to say, my mad alchemist-cook aspect has achieved just exactly that.

Before I go on, let me warn all you chocolate chip-eating readers out there that these do not have that ultimate creamy texture that a calorie and oil-based chocolate chip has, or even a carob one made with palm oil. Instead, they are made rich with ground hemp seeds, and thus have a very rich brownie-fudge texture. But it is luscious in its own right and imitates a baking chip just enough to call it delicious and add another flavor dimension to my old stand-by versions of oatmeal-millet-raisin cookies.

The other ingredient that helps with the fudgy creamy mouth feel is now a trendy one, but it takes me back to my Italian peasant roots: the cooking liquid from chickpeas known as aqua fava. It is so popular these days it even has its own facebook page of dishes posted using vegan meringue made from it. In my family of origin, though, chickpeas are called “cecis” (say “checheese”), and aqua fava would more likely be pronounced “agua fav” in the languid dialect of my ancestors. But it’s the same thick magical liquid that gives these pieces more body and rich mouthfeel than they get only using water.

You have to blend, cook, and then freeze these babies before you can break them up with a knife and then quickly usher them into your cookie dough with a fork before popping the cookies onto the baking sheet and into the oven. The window is narrow, but it works. I even could see the corners sticking out of cookies melt into goo through that little window in the oven door I almost never clean. By the time they come out of the oven they are harder and as dark as the raisins, but when you bite into the cookie, you still get a bit of gooey fudgey texture and a rich taste from the marriage of the ingredients.

My son, who eats his share of vegan chocolate chips right out of the bag, vetted my pronouncement about these carob pieces when he was over helping me with painting a new patch of drywall. I had some cooling on the kitchen table, and if Mike is willing to help me match paint over new drywall like the great son he is, then the least I can do is be willing to share my cookies. But I did so with a disclaimer that he might not like the “fake” chocolate chips.

However, I got the best reception from a chocolate lover I could hope for: the bite into, the raised eyebrow, the exclamation–“these are really good!” And then the best part; “can I have another one?”

So if you are adventurous, here is the recipe to try your own hand at some low fat vegan oil and gluten free kitchen alchemy. I put them in cookie batter which is a hybrid between classic oatmeal millet raisin cookies and crunchy millet cookies. Even without measuring, it is a great background for these “chips.”

       Print Recipe    

I have a confession to make though. I really liked these, but when I put them in the cookies without the raisins, I missed the raisins. I know most people would rather walk a mile for a chocolate chip cookie and throw a raisin oatmeal cookie to the wind (not to the dog, because raisins are poisonous to them), but I REALLY love my oatmeal raisin cookies. I never get tired of them. Still, if I want to take them up to the next notch, adding these pieces makes it sort of like having raisinets in the cookies. And that makes me feel like watching an old movie. And having another cookie.