Our Primal Chocolate Chip Cookie Experiment

This weekend Tracy and I decided to try the primal chocolate chip cookie recipe that Mark Sisson posted on Mark's Daily Apple.

Mark's ingredient list:

• 4 dates, pits removed
• 1 1/2 cup walnuts
• 1/2 cup pecans
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons coconut oil
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/4 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips

We ended up modifying it a bit.  Instead of using four dates, we started by using 4 coconut date rolls.  Each of these The instructions were to put the dates in a food processor and grind them to a paste.  The date rolls were too dry to form a paste so we added two more dates along with some water in which we had soaked the dates.  We substituted 1/2 cup of Ghirardelli 100% chocolate bar chopped into 'chips.'

From left to right clockwise starting at top: Dates soaked in water, Ghirardelli 100% chocolate bar, and coconut date rolls.  Sorry for the blurry quality.

We followed the original instructions to grind the dates to a paste then add the pecans and walnuts to the processor and allow it to chop the nuts finely.  The original instructions suggested only 35 seconds in the processor would adequately chop the nuts, but we found it took longer, possibly because we used a very small processor.  We would change the procedure.  We think it would work better to make the date paste, then remove the date paste from the processor and use it to chop the nuts separately, then add the date paste back into the nuts and allow the processor to mix the dates and nuts.

Otherwise, the recipe went smoothly and after we had all the ingredients mixed the batter looked like this (photo taken after 2/3 of batter already put in oven):

Of course we tried the raw batter and it tasted good.  We got a total of 12 cookies out of the batter. When they came out of the oven they looked like this:

The unsweetened chocolate was the perfect complement to the dates.  We tried a couple of them as soon as they were cool enough to eat, and we liked them warm, but we found that they tasted even better after sitting for 4 hours, during which the flavors had better married.

I did a nutrtion analysis on the recipe.  These cookies supply 73% of calories as fat, 20% as carbohydrate, and 6% as protein.  When the whole batch is split into 12 cookies, each cookie supplies 224 calories, 20 g fat, 12 g carbohydrate (3 g of which is fiber), and 4 g protein.  For comparison, according to NutritionData.com, Pillsbury Chocolate Chip Cookies supply 135 calories, 7 g fat, 17 g carbohydrate, and 1 g protein.

The 'primal' cookie has nearly twice as many calories as a conventional cookie, and only slightly fewer grams of carbohydrate.  This to me illustrates one of the problems with making 'primal' versions of conventional foods, namely that the caloric concentration of foods made with nuts instead of grain flours is much higher...  If you use these foods often and don't move around a lot, expect some weight gain.