I have been allergic to nuts for the better part of ten years, and aside from the anxiety and hives, the worst part has to be no longer being able to enjoy the delicious traditional German baked goods of my youth. I have a month-long break from school coming up that coincides nicely with Christmas, so I decided to use that time to do something that no one else seems to have done yet, which is to figure out how to make these decidedly nutty baked goods without nuts.
“Why not just leave the nuts out?” you might ask.
Sure, I could do that with some of these recipes, but most German Christmas cookies contain a ground almond or hazelnut base that defines the flavor and texture of the cookie. I want to see how close I can get to replicating those things, or creating complimentary substitutes with similarly oily and protein-rich ingredients like seeds. It’s SCIENCE, y’all!
“Surely someone must have done this before! Have you checked the internet?” you might also say. YES. obviously. I’m a millennial, I google all my problems. There’s very little out there. My very unscientific research has led me to conclude the following things:
- Germans don’t believe in nut allergies (or don’t have them as frequently as we do) (though I personally know several who think nut allergies were made up by Americans)
- Americans who are allergic to nuts either a) don’t have significant German ties, b) are also allergic to a bunch of other stuff and/or c) are kinda bad at baking.
- I am kind of lazy. I mean, I googled but I really only looked at the first page, and I really just skimmed it each time. (I said this wasn’t scientific).
Re #2:
if you spend as much time looking at “alternative recipes” as I do, then you already know the three categories of recipe sites aimed at this market:
- Allergy mom blogs. Usually called something like “Xanthipe-Friendly Baking”, this blog mostly contains lengthy and overly-detailed stories that are not about baking, with a short recipe at the end of the post that details mom’s success subbing out peanut butter for sunbutter in her favorite PB+J recipe. who would have thought??
- Keto/Paleo/Whole 30/Gluten-Free Lifestyle/ other fad diet masquerading as a health newsletter. Usually includes a lengthy description of the author’s workout, plus a list of the many ways that gluten WILL kill you. The recipe contains no eggs, flour, dairy products or sugar, and the “cookies” are in fact just balls of rice and chia seeds held together with a mix of coconut oil, agave and matcha powder. The plus side of this site is that its fixation on weight loss will also remind you that you’re a trash human who doesn’t even deserve cookies anyway!
- The vegan community. I have nothing against vegan food except that it is sometimes boring and differently textured than I am really comfortable with. Many vegans rely on nut products as a source of protein and as a binding agent in baked goods, meaning that the oat-flax cookies I was excited about making from the site are actually scoops of almond butter with some oatmeal, which is not helpful to me.
All of this leads us into the announcement of my next project, which will be a series on this very blog detailing my attempts to recreate classic German Christmas baked goods without one of their staple ingredients. There’s clearly a market for tested nut-free recipes, even if that market is just me. Can I do it? Stay tuned to find out!
weary traveler 