Zero Waste Raisin Oatmeal Cookies | The Clean Kilo

Today I’ll be showing you how to make my favourite cookies of all time, raisin oatmeal! These are a chunky variation, perfect for dunking in milk.

Today’s post is a little different to my usual as I tried a zero waste supermarket. In the past few months I’ve seen a few documentaries about how our food and plastic waste are at ridiculous levels, so I decided to make a change and cut mine down to the very minimum I can. Since January 1st 2019, I’ve managed to get my waste down by 75% and all done by making changes which were easy to implement. While buying your ingredients in bulk from the supermarket or wholesale may work out more convenient or cheaper, how much of the packaging is recyclable? How many of you are going to put the ingredients into jars/container once you’re

I had seen these zero waste shops before but never really tried one before as it seemed confusing but its far from it. The nearest one for me is in Digbeth, Birmingham and it’s called The Clean Kilo. If you haven’t visited before, you’re missing out. I would recommend taking your own jars and/or containers but if don’t have any, don’t worry, they have some you can purchase in-store. 

The Clean Kilo offers a wide range of products from baking ingredients, dried fruit and eggs through to oils and vinegar, locally grown vegetables and nuts & seeds, perfect for when you may need an exact amount – the prices are very competitive. 

The aim of zero waste shopping is to lower the amount of packaging wastage as well as food waste. I don’t know about you but I’m guilty of buying a certain ingredient that I may not use every time I bake, then it gets stored (and sometimes forgotten abou) and I may not need it until it’s gone past the use by date and that’s not only annoying but also wasteful. If you’re like that, don’t forget FIFO (first in first out), that’s the one super useful thing I learnt at college.

The one thing I wasn’t sure about was how it all worked I regards to weighing and getting the final price, it’s actually really simple. The day I visited the women working behind the counter was called Dominika and she was really helpful and informative which was great, she couldn’t have been more helpful. When it comes to weighing and measuring your ingredients, you’ll want to start by getting your empty container and placing it onto the scales, then print out the sticker (this sticker is simply for the weight of the container, keep this one on the container if you intend on using it again in the future, you won’t have to print another one off that way), then you go and fill your container with the product you wish, go back to the scales then scan the bar code on the sticker you printed out earlier on and reweigh the container and print out your final sticker which is the price you’ll pay. Finally you can then go and pay and know you’ve saved some packaging waste from going into the bin.

I’d seen some videos and blog posts online where people had tried zero waste recipes and this would normally be fairly hard, unless you have a local shop. If you’d like to see more zero waste recipes from me, let me know by commenting on the blog post. This is something that’s helping to prevent both packaging and food waste.

Making these cookies doesn’t take too long, to make, so you don’t need an awful lot of time to make them.

Ingredients:

100g Butter.

100g Golden Caster Sugar.

100g Light Brown Sugar.

1 Egg.

225g Plain Flour.

1/2 tsp Baking Powder.

150g Oats.

100g Raisins.

 

Method:

• Before you start on these cookies, you’ll want to do some prep work. Weigh up all your ingredients, line a baking tray with greaseproof/parchment paper and preheat your oven to 180˚c/350˚f.
• Start your cookies by placing the butter, golden caster sugar and light brown sugar into a bowl and beat on a medium-high speed until they are well combined.
• Once they are all combined give your bowl a good scrape down and add in your egg and mix on a medium speed until it’s fully incorporated.
• Give your bowl a good scrape down, to incorporate any bits that haven’t been fully worked in.
• Sift in your dry ingredients and mix them in on a low-medium speed until almost fully incorporated, then add in the oats and raisins and give a mix until the flour is fully incorporated and the oats and raisins are well distributed within the dough.
• The dough doesn’t require being chilled before use, so you can use it straight away.
• Take a cookie scoop and scoop up two balls of dough per cookie, roll them together into one and he flatten them slightly before placing onto your baking tray, these cookies don’t spread very much while baking.

Place the baking tray into your preheated oven and bake for 8-10 minutes or until slightly coloured around the edge.

Once out of the oven, an optional finish would be to add a few raisins on top.

Allow to cool on the baking tray until fully cooled, then enjoy them. I had mine with a glass of cold milk!

*These cookies can be frozen before being baked, just make sure that they are flattened before you freeze them or after they are baked, just keep them wrapped in clingfilm/plastic wrap.