Phorum Dalal
Japanese luxury cookie brand Yoku Moku completes two years in India on August 10 and to mark the festive season, it has rolled out, for the first time, two flavours of eggless cookies solely for the Indian market.
Wrapped in turquoise and pastel pink respectively, the Double Beurre Chocolat Au Lait, a butter cookie with milk chocolate filling and Double Cacao Chocolat Blanc with white chocolate filling has been created to retain the melt-in-the-mouth, buttery experience.
The brand, brought in by Liberty Group’s Liberty Luxuries opened its first store at Horniman Circle, Mumbai on August 10, 2017, and is now present in four cities including Delhi, Kolkata and Bengaluru. It is most popular for cigare roll butter cookies and mainly perceived as a gifting brand. So, if you have been looking for Raksha Bandhan gifting options, you’ve one more luxury option to consider.
Naoka Wada and Noritaka Tochiya, international managers, tell LuxeBook that it took their research and development team some time to roll out the vegetarian versions to ensure the experience was on par with the eggless version. “We always knew there would be a demand for vegetarian options. While we have 11 products and some seasonal offerings globally, the vegetarian options will be available round the year,” says Wada.
The original cookies are made with more Hokkaido butter and less flour content, it was egg white that held the melt-in-the-mouth cookies together. Compared to the egg cookies, the texture is a bit grainy, and doesn’t melt in the mouth immediately, but the taste is bang on. The filling of chocolate is velvety fine too. Overall, there is hardly any different, thanks to the butter flour ratio that has been maintained.
“The egg white, that binds the cookies together has been replaced with whey protein,” explains Wada, adding that the team experimented with various other ingredients like almond flour before zeroing on whey.
Make cookies, not war
YOKU MOKU owes its unique significance to the Swedish town,Jokkmokk where the founder Noriichi Fujinawa first tasted European butter cookies during World War II. It took Fujinawa years to perfect the ingredients and recipe, finding the perfect focal ingredient in high-grade Hokkaido butter. His philosophy, which the brand till date follows: “Making confectionery is a creation, not a production.”
While the world was still reeling from the effects of World War II, Fujinawa continued baking for he believed, “Confectionery and cookies are important to our lives.”
Each box of eggless cookies has 26 cookies (13 of each flavour), priced at Rs2,405 per box.
Available across stores in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Bengaluru
