MOLTO - Why Our London-Made Cookie Has Cassava Flour and Miso Paste In It

Two ingredients on the MOLTO label tend to get a second look: cassava flour and white miso paste. Neither is standard cookie territory, and both are in our London kitchen on purpose.

Cassava flour is milled from the whole cassava root, a starchy vegetable that's been a dietary staple across South America, Africa and parts of Asia for centuries. It behaves a lot like wheat flour when you bake with it, which makes it useful for structure, but without any gluten. We use it instead of the more common alternative, tapioca starch, which is a refined extract of the same root rather than the whole thing. Tapioca starch does a similar structural job. Cassava flour does it as a genuine whole food rather than a processed derivative, which is the difference we care about.

It's also one of the most finicky ingredients in the recipe. Too much of it and the cookie turns rubbery once it hits the microwave. Too little and it doesn't hold together properly. Getting that balance right took several versions of testing before it stopped being a variable we had to think about.

White miso paste is the ingredient that surprises people most. It's a fermented soybean paste, the same thing you'd find in miso soup, and it's in the cookie in a small enough amount that you won't taste it as miso. What it does is deepen the other flavours, the same way a pinch of salt makes caramel taste more like caramel rather than making it taste salty. It's a flavour tool, not a savoury addition, and it's the kind of trick you'll find in serious baking more often than you'd think.

Neither ingredient is there because it sounds impressive on a label. Cassava flour solves a structural problem without wheat. Miso solves a flavour problem without more sugar. That's the standard for everything in a MOLTO cookie: if it's in there, it's doing a specific job, and we can tell you exactly what it is.

See the full ingredient list on the pack →