Najla’s Classic Chocolate Chunk cookie.
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KAREN HOCHMAN is Editorial Director of THE NIBBLE.
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December 2006
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Najla’s Gone Chunky Chocolate Chip & Oatmeal Cookies
With Big Chunks Of Chocolate ... Nuts ... And More
CAPSULE REPORT: Najla is a woman who knew what she wanted in a chocolate chip cookie. She set out to make the most chock-full-of-chocolate cookies she could, and she has succeeded. These are cookies worth buying and sending as gifts—and they’re kosher, too. Available pre-baked or frozen-and-bake-your-own, we enjoyed them equally baked hot and gooey or in their frozen dough form (yes, we’re cookie dough addicts).
Najla’s Gone Chunky cookies make a statement. Open a neat box of her ready-to-bake frozen cookies, and everything is orderly perfection. In a unique packaging concept, the cookie dough is hand-shaped and frozen on individual, crimped parchment baking cups. The six large cookies, stuffed with big, rectangular chocolate chunks and nestled in their cups, actually look dressed-up and ready-to-eat. If you love eating raw cookie dough, they are ready to eat; but most people will pop them in the oven and wait for the hot cookies to emerge in 17 to 20 minutes.
Classic Flavors
Najla bakes the classics: Classic Chocolate Chunk (no nuts), Classic Gone Nuts! (with big walnut halves), Macadamia Chocolate Chunk, Espresso Walnut Chunk and Oatmeal Cherry Chunk (with white chocolate).
All are quarter-pounders—that is, they weigh 4 ounces (and measure more than 3 inches long by 2 inches wide). By some kind of kitchen alchemy, the cookies don’t spread when they cook, but emerge from the oven in the same perfect, chunky shape they had when they went in.
Najla has been baking cookies for almost 20 years. She thinks of everything. She provides the parchment cups for the cookies so they can go into the oven as is, providing grease-free, perfect browning. She provides six extra baking parchments for people who have the restraint to eat a 2-ounce cookie. We don’t know these people, but they can cut each frozen cookie in half and place them on the extra parchment rounds so that each box makes a dozen smaller cookies. (The extra cups are also pretty for serving the original 6 cookies.)
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Chocolate Walnut Espresso Chunk, a 2005 NASFT finalist for “Outstanding Dessert” and “Outstanding Cookie Or Cracker.” |
Tasting through this line is an awfully nice way to spend a week. While those who are extremely fussy about their chocolate chip cookies will argue that the recipe could have a higher percentage of brown sugar to white, and the ongoing debate over chewy versus crunchy texture will never end (these are chewy), no one will dispute that Najla’s cookies are delicious. Chocolate Walnut Espresso Chunk was tapped as a finalist in the annual NASFT Fancy Food Show competition the year it debuted and we agree: while Chocolate Walnut Espresso is not generally our favorite flavor, we couldn’t stop eating these! The entire line won “Best In Show” as well as “Best Snack Food” at this year’s Kosherfest.
Like all fine artisan products, Gone Chunky cookies are made in small batches using top-of-the-line ingredients: organic bleached wheat flour, large Belgian chocolate chunks from Callebaut, the freshest nuts, pure Madagascar vanilla extract and premium butter and eggs. Add to that the chunky consistency—a rare combination of density, breadth, height and packed ingredients—and you have something wonderfully different with a wow-factor in eye appeal (these photos don’t do the cookies justice). As noted previously, when we opened the box of frozen cookies, they looked so perfectly edible, we wondered if they need to be baked. We now will admit: we baked half the cookies and ate the other half raw.*
*The eggs are pasteurized and THE NIBBLE’s physician has advised us that the odds of salmonella poisoning from frozen dough are extremely rare. We personally assume that risk—we also eat steak tartare—but cannot assume it for our readers.
Fresh, Hot Gourmet Cookies Anytime
Those aren’t almonds—the Oatmeal Cherry Chunk
cookies are made with white chocolate chunks.
There are no nuts.
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What we like about Najla’s Gone Chunky Cookies is how easy they make it to serve your loved ones (include yourself on that list) a hot, fresh-baked cookie. To anyone coming home after school, returning from a hard day at work, reaching sanctuary wet and cold from the rain, not feeling well from fatigue or the sniffles, finishing a particularly difficult task...this is an energizing reward. And the reward for the “cook” is that one doesn’t have to bake an entire batch of cookies: Make one or two (or even a half) in the toaster oven. Sure, you could use a slice-and-bake cookie log from the grocery store, but you could also serve grocery store boxed chocolate chip cookies. Not much reward there! |
The reward is in being able to serve (and eat!) these delicious, “homemade” cookies without needing to wash a bowl or even grease the cookie sheet.
Already-Baked Cookies
Chocolate Macadamia Chunk cookies are a popular
combination.
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In option #2, Najla will do all of the work for you, and will send a dozen of any flavor cookie already baked and ready-to-eat.
Whether you choose the baked road or the frozen cookies, it is a very special treat. Send a box as a special-occasion gift, as a thank-you, as a surprise to your favorite cookie-dough addict. It’s a different type of holiday gift, but one box of each flavor may prove to be the best thing someone receives this is holiday season. Don’t forget to keep a box or two in your freezer.
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The frozen cookies are sold in gourmet supermarket chains like Wegmans and specialty food stores. Now, with that gourmet, hot-from-the-oven cookie store in the village or at the mall in your freezer, you don’t have to decide how many to buy or what flavors. Keep Najla’s in the freezer and enjoy whatever you want, whenever you want: one at a time or by the boxful.
NAJLA’s GONE CHUNKY® GOURMET COOKIES
Chocolate Walnut Espresso, Classic Chocolate Chunk, Classic Gone Nuts!, Macadamia Chocolate Chunk, Oatmeal Cherry Chunk
Certified kosher (D) by Orthodox Union
All cookies are quarter-pound
- 6 Frozen Cookies, Any Flavor
$10.99
- One Dozen Fresh-Baked
Cookies
$24.95
Purchase online at
Najlas.com
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For a cookie-licious gift, send someone a box of every flavor.
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Shipping additional. Prices and flavor availability are verified at publication but are subject to change.
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