Oreo cookies are a Canadian childhood lunchbox staple, as I’m sure they are in the US. Whether you grew up being eaten alive by mosquitos in Winnipeg or across the border in Minneapolis, these basic cookies transcend national boundaries with their simple chocolate-and-vanilla taste.
If we’re being honest here, I’m not strictly sure why they have such a place in our collective minds, other than elementary school nostalgia. They’re fine, but they’re not incredible. They’re the kind of cookie you eat because it’s there, because of the power of supermarket inertia.
For anyone outside of North America, Oreos are a sandwich cookie made up of two baked chocolate cookie discs with a layer of vanilla icing in the middle that glues the two outer cookie discs together. In a standard Oreo, the ratio of cookie-to-icing-to-cookie feels like 2:1:2 — so, the layer of icing in the middle is maybe half as thick as the outer cookie pieces. The Double-Stuf (why the missing F in stuff, Mr. Christie?) variety adds more icing in the middle, doubling the stuff (stuf?) inside the Oreo.
Eating an Oreo (a Roadmap)
Part of the lure of the Oreo cookie is the ritual of eating them, which we develop from an early age. For this, you have a few options.
- Dunkers: Some folks love to have their Oreos with milk, and will dunk them into a glass of cold milk before scarfing them down. This is no doubt part of the whole cookies-and-cream flavour genesis, where creamy dairy and Oreo-style chocolate cookies are combined into milk shakes, ice cream, and chocolate bars. Not my thing, but it has a Norman Rockwell Americana vibe.
- Soulless MBAs: You can also just eat them on their own, dry and fully intact, and without milk. No twist or anything else fun and therefore inefficient. This is the most boring option, and probably the one favoured by children who eventually grow up to be MBAs. What a miserable life. Don’t you have some stuffed animals to lay off?
- Twisters: Since the dawn of Oreos, kids have figured out that if you twist the cookie, the layers will separate, and you’ll be left with one hard chocolate cookie top, and one combined piece that’s got both the cookie bottom and the layer of icing on it. You can then eat the top cookie on its own, then use your teeth or tongue to scrape off the layer of icing from the bottom cookie, enjoy that on its own, and then eat the now-icingless bottom cookie. Or you can eat the top cookie first, then eat the bottom icing/cookie piece; this gives you an icing-to-cookie ratio closer to what you’d get with a Double-Stuf Oreo.
If you love the chocolate cookie discs more than the sweet, sweet icing inside, then regular Oreos are for you. But if you’re an icing fancier, then you’re the prime market for Double-Stuf.
Tasting the Double-Stuf
When you bite into a Double Stuf Oreo (soulless MBA style), the pressure from your teeth is enough to cause the top cookie to mash down at an angle into the thick layer of icing, creating an icing-lubricated tectonic-plate-like shift that lifts the back of the top cookie up and off the icing as the icing in the front tries to flee out the sides. Regular-stuf Oreos don’t do this, which is a testament to the ratio originally devised by the Oreo food scientists.
If you’re on Team Icing, you’re going to love this. The gloriously artificial flavour in the icing melts in your mouth and overwhelms the hard cocoa crunch from the cookie layers.
For Twisters, rest assured that these still come apart like regular Oreos. But when you eat the bottom cookie disc with the icing, it’s even more intensely sweet than if you’d done the same thing with a regular Oreo. Maybe you like that, or maybe you don’t.
The Details
Price: $4.49 for a 261 gram package at Safeway in Edmonton.
Value for Money: Fine. Cheaper elsewhere. (Check Dollarama in Canada.)
Availability: Ubiquitous.
Nutrition: 140 calories per 2 cookies.
Wait, They’re Vegan?: Yes, indeed. Oreos are what my vegan pal Brian would call “accidentally vegan.” There’s no indication that they’re vegan on the packaging, but if you look at the ingredients, there’s no dairy in there. Proof yet again that vegan doesn’t necessarily mean health food.
Verdict: How you feel about these will depend on whether you’re more about the cookie or the filling. I’m a filling fellow, so these are my jam. Why go back to single-stuf?
