The Living Clean Guide to Avoiding Glyphosate & Other Bad Stuff in Food (Part 10) – Desserts & Sweets
Alden’s Cookies ‘n’ Cream Ice Cream
Chocolate
A problem with chocolate is that even products from the best companies can be occasionally contaminated with mycotoxins. Eating chocolate at all is, therefore, sort of a crapshoot from a toxicity standpoint.
The one exception to this is Bulletproof Chocolate Fuel Bars, which are guaranteed to be low in mycotoxins. However, these bars contain xylitol, which I consider to be a toxic substance and which I believe eventually will be found to have been a huge mistake for people to be eating. So I cannot recommend those.
Chocolate is healthful enough and enjoyable enough that I think it’s worth the risk of coming across a contaminated bar from time to time. And actually, I have eaten all of the brands listed below repeatedly and done really well with them almost all of the time.
The most interesting of these brands to me is Sjaak’s, a small northern California company owned by a chocolate maker who learned his craft as a boy in the Netherlands. Sjaak’s makes a variety of delicious chocolate bites (small, reasonably priced chocolates filled with almond butter, caramel, hazelnut truffle or other confections) as well as more standard chocolate bars. Their Mint Mills remind me of the Frango mints that I used to buy from the old Marshall Field’s in Chicago, except that these are much yummier and certainly more healthful than those ever were.
Alter Eco also makes some pretty good filled truffles that are more widely available in stores.
One brand that is not organic (just GMO-free) and that also is not gluten-free (due to pretzel cross-contamination) is Bark Thins, which makes bags of chocolate bark with various items added (I especially like the pumpkin-seed version). It is really delicious chocolate and almost always has felt very good to me. I do not feel any hesitation about purchasing it due to toxicity concerns (though I have generally steered clear of the pretzel ones since they have non-organic wheat that could be glyphosate contaminated).
I recently tried a Meltaway Mint Truffle Bar from Seattle Chocolates (non-organic, non-GMO) and was really impressed by it. Although the other items that I have tried from them so far have been more sweet than I prefer, the line feels pretty clean to me and seems to have some potential.
I have especially enjoyed the raw Lulu’s chocolate bars. It is a pricey brand and can be hard to find in stores, but sometimes they offer free shipping on their website. My favorite is the Smoked Sea Salt Almond, but I suggest trying a variety pack (and maybe also the Maca Buttercups).
Rawmio is a newer raw-chocolate company that also is producing very good products featuring high-quality and healthful ingredients, with broader distribution in natural-foods retailers.
Alter Eco, Theo and Dagoba offer a variety of chocolate bars that I have consistently found enjoyable. Probably my favorite of these is the Alter Eco Dark Quinoa bar, which reminds me a bit of a Nestle Crunch bar.
One product from Dagoba that I really like is their Tasting Squares, which are small individually wrapped chocolate bars (one-third of an ounce each).
Dagoba also makes another noteworthy product called Chocodrops, which are little discs of mildly sweet dark chocolate (74% cacao). I generally have just added them to trail mix, but they also would be good for baking.
A more standard-shaped bittersweet chocolate chip (organic and 65% cacao) that is appropriate for baking is offered by Sunspire. I have only tried it once and thought it was pretty good.
For organic artisan chocolates sold in gift boxes, the award-winning Monterey Chocolate Company is worth checking out. They are located in northern California but shipping may be a possibility.
A brand that I have yet to try but that I have heard good things about from chocolate professionals is Lake Champlain Chocolates, which has many organic items.
Stirs the Soul is another raw-chocolate line that I would like to try.
Although the brands listed here are the ones that came up as top-rated in the Mercey Hot Springs organic chocolate tasting and that I have subsequently had particularly good experiences with, other organic chocolates may have the potential of being really good too, at least some of the time.
In addition, it is my feeling that good chocolate made in Europe has the potential of being far superior to all of these other brands on both purity and taste, even if it is not labeled as organic or GMO-free and even if it is not terribly expensive. I recently purchased a bar of Zoet chocolate (from Belgium) at my local Hy-Vee grocery store that turned out to be the best chocolate I had had in a very long time, for instance.
Recommended Chocolate:
Nut & Seed Butter Cups
Justin’s peanut butter cups are the chocolate treat that I likely have purchased the most frequently over the past few years. I especially like the fact that their minis are sold in reclosable bags so that I can have a small piece as desired rather than feeling obliged to finish a larger two-cup serving. Although I have always purchased the dark-chocolate version, I am interested in the new white-chocolate ones as well.
Recently I tried Theo peanut butter cups, which seem on the surface almost exactly like the Justin’s (although I admit that the cups being heart-shaped is pretty charming). The main differences seem to be on attributes other than taste: Theo is soy-free (but I am not convinced that soy lecithin in chocolate is much of a concern); is free of palm oil (but Justin’s states that its palm oil is sourced responsibly); and is Fair for Life Certified (Justin’s instead is Rainforest Alliance Certified). The Justin’s product also is slightly saltier, which I actually find to be a good attribute in a peanut butter cup. Either of these brands could be a fine choice, I think.
I am more interested in trying Theo Almond Butter Cups, but so far I have not come across them. (However, I did get a chance to try the coconut salted almond version of the new Theo Coconut Bites. It was very similar to an Almond Joy bar and was quite yummy.)
Lulu’s sells raw-chocolate cups filled with a mixture of maca and raw almond butter, presented in attractive little boxes. This is an enjoyable product but on the high end in terms of pricing. I have seen this particular Lulu’s item available only on the company’s website rather than in stores.
Sun Cups consist of sunflower butter wrapped in milk chocolate or dark chocolate cups. I am a sunflower seed butter fan and do not think that people need to be unable to tolerate peanut butter or other nut butters to really enjoy these cups. (The company also makes cups filled caramel or mint cream that I have not tried.) The products are GMO-free but not certified as organic.
Probably my favorite nut butter cups are the little “bites” from Sjaak’s, a small all-organic chocolate company located in northern California. This company (owed by an artisan chocolate maker from the Netherlands) produces peanut butter cups as well as cups with other nut butters such as almond or hazelnut. The quality is terrific; the price is reasonable; and all the products are vegan and soy-free. Although they are available individually or in tubs to consumers via mail order, I feel that the best use of them is for local organic-type food co-ops or stores to purchase a tub and then to sell the chocolates individually near the checkout counter. They are addictive enough that many people will stop by just to purchase a couple (and then buy other items while in the store), and it is a nice customer service besides.
Recommended Chocolate Cups:
Lulu’s Chocolate Raw Maca Buttercups
Theo Peanut Butter Cups & Coconut Bites
Chocolate Spreads
Quite a few companies now produce organic or mostly organic chocolate spreads (many of them with hazelnut butter mixed in).
Of the versions listed below, I think the Italian one – Rigoni di Asiago Nocciolato – is the clear winner in terms of quality and yumminess.
Nutiva’s version is less expensive and less sweet, and thus more suited for use as an everyday spread.
Justin’s also makes an reasonably good product (organic except for the nuts and palm oil) that is especially useful since it comes in convenient travel packets.
There are three additional new contenders in this category that I would like to try: Raw Mio (an organic and wholly raw product); Jem (an organic raw product with sprouted hazelnuts, raw cacao nibs and coconut sugar); and Barefoot & Chocolate (a partly organic product that gets great reviews).
Although I like chocolate spreads, I rarely have purchased them except when doing taste testing. Instead, if I want this kind of treat, I usually just mix some cocoa powder with melted coconut oil and raw honey, and maybe a little nut butter, to create a healthful version of my own.
Justin’s Chocolate Hazelnut Butter (2)
Dessert Sauces
The organic hot fudge and caramel sauces by King’s Cupboard are extraordinarily delicious and use only high-quality organic ingredients – cane sugar, butter, cream, chocolate, cocoa, vanilla, tapioca syrup, milk and sea salt.
I would suggest sticking with the organic versions even if they need to be ordered directly from the company (rather than being tempted by the non-organic products currently being sold via Amazon or Vitacost since those likely are using conventional dairy products).
The Ah!Laska is a pretty good, basic chocolate syrup that seems designed to appeal especially to kids.
King’s Cupboard Chocolate & Caramel Sauces
Drinking Chocolate
My favorite drinking chocolate is Taza, which comes in discs of stoneground chocolate. The preparation method – which involves grating stone-ground chocolate by hand and then mixing it into milk or water – does take a little more time than just dumping powder into a cup, but it leads to a more enjoyable cup of hot chocolate and the experience is a little richer as well.
The Taza discs contain just cacao powder, cane sugar and spices. They are available in several different flavors: cinnamon, coffee, salted almond, vanilla, two kinds of chili peppers, extra-dark and regular.
For powdered chocolate, I recently have enjoyed the NibMor brand. It has just a few ingredients (cacao powder, coconut sugar, spices) and is not too sweet. It comes only in single-serve packets, in Traditional, 6 Spice and Mint flavors. (The contents of each pack easily make two good cups of cocoa though, in my opinion.)
Dagoba is another brand of hot cocoa that I have really enjoyed. It contains just cane sugar, cocoa, bits of chocolate and (in some versions) spices. (For some reason there also are trace amounts of milk.) I especially like the spicy version.
Sjaak’s and Theo also make drinking chocolates. I have not had a chance to try those yet, but based on the quality of those companies’ other products, I have little doubt that they are very good.
I’m also interested in Lake Champlain’s organic hot chocolate, which contains just sugar and chocolate.
Ice Cream
Straus (located in Petaluma, CA) uses their own high-quality milk and cream to make a variety of delicious ice creams that feel very clean to me. All of their products are both organic and gluten-free, and the cookies in their new Lemon Gingersnap version are made by Pamela’s. I especially like the Caramel Toffee flavor. The products are sold mostly in pints.
Three Twins (located in nearby San Rafael, CA) also makes exceptional quality organic ice cream in creative flavor varieties (such as sea salted caramel or cardamon). I also recently tried one of their new ice cream sandwiches and thought that (despite the fact that the chocolate-chip cookies contain wheat) it was really terrific. Although most of the flavors of ice cream do not include any ingredients with gluten in them, a few (such as the lemon cookie and malt ones) do contain gluten and cross-contamination of the equipment has the potential of occurring.
Alden’s (based in Oregon) sells quarts of very good ice cream in basic flavors, available pretty widely. A few flavors of the ice cream contain ingredients with gluten in them and equipment is shared, but the company says that it is careful about cross-contamination and tests each batch of gluten-free ice cream for the presence of gluten before shipping it out.
Julie’s (which is owned by the same company as Alden’s) mostly sells ice cream bars and sandwiches. The company makes makes a gluten-free ice cream sandwich and uses the same strategy as Alden’s to prevent cross-contamination from occurring.
New Barn AlmondCreme is a new line of organic almond-milk ice cream, including some vegan flavors as well as others containing eggs. Considering the quality of the New Barn Almondmilk product, I am guessing the ice cream is very good too.
A note about my favorite packaged food product of all time: Increasingly it seems to me that when companies are super-concerned about ingredient quality for the sake of taste, the products tend to be pretty clean even if they are not committing to being organic. I tend to think that the main issue with Graeter’s Ice Cream is that even though they state that they are going out of their way to get good-quality local milk, the cows likely are still getting at least some glyphosate-contaminated feed. Still, this is extraordinarily good ice cream and I eat it without apparent negative effects (except maybe on my waistline) once in a great while. I just wish that eventually they would get around to making an organic flavor or two.
Recommended Ice Creams:
Cookies – Gluten-Free
Many gluten-free cookies contain toxic ingredients or are not very enjoyable to eat, but I have come across a few lines that I do like.
Lundberg Sweet Dreams Chocolate Rice Cakes are an all-organic dessert consisting of a plain rice cakes with a heavy coating of good chocolate on them. Especially for those looking to keep things as clean and simple as possible, they are very nice.
Tate’s Bake Shop makes chocolate-chip cookies with simple quality ingredients, including just rice flour rather than a mix of grains. I was surprised at how delicious they were the first time I tried them – almost indistinguishable from the regular Tate’s chocolate-chip cookies. They are non-organic but marked as GMO-free, and they do not contain any ingredients of particular concern to me.
Jovial (an Italian company) makes gluten-free cookies that are organic and filled with chocolate cream, fig paste or sour cherry preserves. These are soft and actually quite wonderful when fresh, but very hard and basically inedible when stale. Although I have found that I can resuscitate the cookies to some extent by steaming them briefly on the rack in my Instant Pot, buying them is still taking a risk.
Recommended Gluten-Free Cookies:
Lundberg Sweet Dreams Chocolate Rice Cakes
Cookies – European Wheat
The packaged cookies that I like the most and consistently do perfectly fine with are gourmet-type brands from Europe, which I am sometimes able to find in natural or gourmet food stores.
I especially like Jovial cookies, which are organic, not very sweet, and made with Einkorn wheat (an ancient grain that is often tolerated by those who are sensitive to regular wheat).
But I almost never have had any problems with other high-quality European cookies either, even though they are never marked as organic and and even though they contain regular wheat.
Because glyphosate is so much less prevalent in Europe than in the U.S., and because these cookie companies are being so careful to continue to source the same sorts of high-quality ingredients that they have used for many decades or centuries, and because I feel good after eating these cookies, the lack of overt statements about GMO’s on their packaging does not concern me too much.
Following is a list of some of the European cookies that I have personally enjoyed, but other European brands with simple lists of ingredients likely would be just as good.
Other than concerns about breakage and staleness, the main consideration for me in purchasing European cookies is making sure that they were actually made in Europe. Products made in North America according to European recipes are not the same thing at all.
While I agree that there is something that seems a little perverse in my suggesting that people skip the Cheerios but go ahead and eat these yummy European cookies, until the U.S. food supply gets cleaned up, I do think that is where we are at. While I do not eat cookies like this very often, I seem to do just fine with them when I do eat them – and I think there’s a good reason for that.
Recommended European Wheat Cookies:
Anna’s Ginger Thins (Sweden) (1, 2)
Jovial Einkorn Tea Cookies (Italy) (2)
Jules Destrooper Almond Thins (Belgium) (1, 2)
Loacker Quadratini Cream Wafers (Austria) (1, 2)
Lotus Biscoff (Belgium) (1, 2)
LU Petit Ecolier Chocolate Biscuits (France) (1, 2)
Pierre Biscuiterie French Butter Cookies (France) (1,2)
Cookies – North American Wheat
Cadia – a Canadian company – makes quite yummy organic maple sandwich cookies shaped like maple leaves, available for sale in the U.S. through independent organic-type groceries as a “house brand.” (Trader Joe’s now sells a version of what looks like the same cookies, but they say nothing about ingredient toxicity on the package and so I will not eat those cookies.) Cadia also makes some additional basic organic cookies that I have not had a chance to try, and I suspect they may be pretty good based on the quality of the maple cookies.
Tate’s Bake Shop makes chocolate-chip wheat cookies that – like the company’s gluten-free version of the cookies – are delicately crisp and very delicious. These are not marked organic (just GMO-free) but I have tried them on several different occasions and never had a problem with them. The company owners express so much concern about ingredient quality that my guess is that they are obtaining their flour from a reliable source such as a specialty milling company that avoids grains contaminated by post-harvest glyphosate spraying, but I have not gotten confirmation of that.
The Newman’s-O’s Sandwich Cookies also have felt and tasted okay to me, even though they are not entirely organic.
Frog Hollow offers a wide variety of delicious-sounding, organic, freshly-made bakery goods – including some cookies – that I have heard very good things about. I only have tried the granola myself, but it was good enough that I would be interested in experimenting more.
Recommended North American Wheat Sandwich Cookies:
Recommended Additional North American Wheat Cookies:
Candies, Mints & Gums
For quite a few years I have been using the strongly flavored organic mints from Newman’s Own. They are pretty widely available (in tins or rolls) in cinnamon, ginger, peppermint and wintergreen varieties, and I’ve felt that they were a much superior product to others that I found on the market.
Pretty recently I discovered the mints from St. Claire’s Organics and realized that I like them even better though. These mints come in tins in a variety of flavors – including Peppermint, Wintermint, Spearmint, Ginger and Licorice – and contain only molasses crystals and organic essential oils. They are very strong and feel really good to me. (Note that I have not tried the raspberry and lemon flavors, which also include citric acid, though.)
St. Claire’s also offers tins of “aromatherapy pastilles” containing just molasses crystals and organic herbs: Tummy Soothers (with slippery elm, peppermint, cardamom, fennel, anise, spearmint, ginger, coriander, cinnamon and eucalyptus) and Throat Soothers (with slippery elm, licorice root, menthol, eucalyptus, echinacea, osha and capsicum).
(Although I feel a little bad about moving on from the Newman’s Own line, that is mitigated to a large extent by the fact that Nell Newman – the driving force for the organics business – was ousted from the company a while after her father’s death, explaining why focus on organic products seems to have disappeared from the organization in recent years.)
I have never been a fan of chewing gum, but Simply Gum – available in mint, cinnamon, ginger, maple, coffee and fennel flavors – actually is a really nice product. It contains just a few natural ingredients in addition to the natural flavor (natural chicle, organic cane sugar, organic vegetable glycerin and organic rice flour). The flavor lasts a pretty long time.
Although crystallized ginger is usually not too hard to find, the product offered by Ginger People is organic and very good quality.
Go Organic uses organic ingredients and natural flavors to make starlight mints and a wide variety of other flavors of wrapped hard candies. I tried the ginger ones and they were pretty good.
Phyto Plus makes organic licorice products under the Zagarese (very strongly flavored tiny candies consisting purely of natural licorice) and Zots (licorice chews and hard candies) names. I have heard some people suggest that these products have been helpful for supporting their adrenals.
I also have heard positive comments about Trader Joe’s organic Peppermints and Gingermints.
Ginger People Crystallized Ginger
St. Claire’s Aromatherapy Pastilles
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