Trader Joe's Gluten Free Ginger Snaps

Day 4 of Gluten-Free Week on the blog: 


My motivation for trying these was partly for the same reasons I explained yesterday with respect to the gluten-free bread. But it was also partly that a long time ago I noticed that Trader Joe's sells a bewildering number of different ginger cookies, and I decided that sooner or later I would try them all.

I'm glad I got this one scratched off the list now, because it's impossible that any of the other ginger cookies could be worse than these. These are repulsive. There's hardly any ginger to them at all--it comes just as an aftertaste. But to get to that aftertaste, you first have to power through the main taste, which is like unflavored starch.

That might not have come as a surprise if I had checked the list of ingredients before eating: tapioca starch, potato starch, corn flour, corn starch, rice flour, chickpea flour, xanthan gum, and so on. Does that sound like what you want in a cookie?

At first I couldn't believe they were really this bad. I had just finished a tub of the wonderful Triple Ginger Snaps, so I thought perhaps these were suffering by comparison, and I was judging them too harshly. So I waited several days, then tried them again. And just to be sure, I repeated that process once more. No improvement. They really are as inedible as my first impression had indicated.

The texture is as bad as the taste. They're so brittle that they're all broken. I ate maybe a third of the bag all told, and I don't think I found a single one intact. What's left of them shatters into shards and crumbs at the first bite.

The only thing I can say favorable about them is that they're not quite as horrendous as the worst-ever Trader Joe's cookies, which are the Peanutters. I think the gluten-free ginger snaps would have to be made with bat guano to be worse than those. Nevertheless, they're bad enough to earn a spot of dubious distinction on my Bottom Ten list.

Will I buy it again? 

Not if they were the last cookies on Earth.