The chef restoring food sovereignty with sunflower cookies
Mariah Gladstone is re-indigenizing food—and sharing a 3-ingredient banger of a recipe
Baking buds, hello! Can you tell I’m adding stories about regenerative bakers into the mix of this newsletter, alongside the recipes, low-waste baking tips, and guides to climate-hero ingredients? Last week I wrote about the pastry chef making climate-themed desserts on top of glaciers. This week, we meet Mariah Gladstone, and drop everything—everything!!—to make her sunflower-seed cookies.
The chef restoring food sovereignty with sunflower cookies
Telling Mariah Gladstone something can’t be done is a surefire way to make it happen. She was at a food sovereignty conference when the idea to start an indigenous cooking show hit her, but she wasn’t planning to actually go through with it until somebody scoffed at her. “Someone said, ‘okay, sure Mariah.’ So then,” she says, “I had to do it.”
The self-taught chef launched Indigikitchen in 2016 to remedy “the multigenerational disconnect” with traditional native foods and how to use them. In step-by-step videos and recipes, she teaches native and nonnative home cooks how to make three sisters soup, pemmican, and modern indigenous desserts like pumpkin-seed brownies and sunflower-maple cookies. With a larder of entirely pre-contact ingredients, she’s imagining a future for dessert that’s delicious, decolonized, and—do we dare to dream?—perhaps even a smidge healthier.
Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Cherokee descent, explains that sweets weren’t a big part of native diets before colonization, with one “major exception: maple country and maple sugar.” But she wanted to include desserts on Indigikitchen anyway because she grew up with them. She learned to bake before she learned to cook, doubling recipes like banana bread because her mom thought the math would sharpen her fraction skills. (Her engineering degree suggests it worked.)
“In the 21st century,” Gladstone says, “desserts are obviously something that’s part of our lives. If we can utilize traditional sugars, things that are easy to access, and of course don’t have a history of colonization associated with them, that’s helpful.”
Some of the foundational ingredients of western pastry—processed cane sugar, wheat flour, and lard—were also mainstays of the government rations issued to tribes after the systematic destruction of traditional food species. In place of those baking staples, Gladstone sees a cross-continent pantry of indigenous ingredients emerging. Maple or agave act as sweeteners, and seeds and roots act as flours, thickeners, or whole treats like candied sunflower seeds. Ground sunflower seeds star in her favorite three-ingredient cookies, playing the double role of flour and binder (a role traditionally played by eggs) because of their high fat content.
Fruits are another key ingredient category. “We have something like 14 different types of edible berries here in Blackfeet country,” Gladstone says, and each can provide natural sweetness or a potent pop of flavor. She drizzles raspberry sauce over dark chocolate brownies, makes serviceberry lemonade, and zhuzhes sunflower cookies with a bright chokecherry sauce.
Gladstone’s main goal is to reconnect native people with traditional foods, building excitement for food sovereignty one easy recipe at a time. But by skipping processed ingredients, she’s also blazing a path forward for dessert that’s healthy—or at least, healthier.
“Sweets are always going to be a treat,” she says, “but there’s lots of ways to do it without overloading someone with corn syrup. For example, add a little bit of maple sugar into a dessert. Then add a little bit of salt, which makes it taste a bit sweeter without actually adding sugar. And because you have that protein and fat that's part of the sunflower seed, you're giving the body something that's also going to fill you up.”
Recipe: Mariah Gladstone’s sunflower maple cookies
Reprinted with permission from Indigikitchen. Thanks for sharing this with us, Mariah!
My recipe notes: Mariah has made these three-ingredient, lightly-sweet cookies for the World Food Forum in Rome and in the backcountry with no stove—just a Ziploc bag and some rocks to crush the sunflower seeds. And they might just be the ultimate afternoon snack. They’re a dessert (important for the psyche), but they’re full of protein and fat (important to avoid the otherwise-inevitable sugar slump). Pro tips from Mariah: Be sure to use raw sunflower seeds, and make them no-bake if you wish.
1 ¾ cups (175g) sunflower seed flour
¼ cup (80g) maple syrup
½ teaspoon salt
Avocado oil for pan (or another neutral oil)
Grind up raw sunflower seeds in a food processor to make a flour.
Add the flour, maple syrup, and salt to a medium bowl and mix until you have an even, sticky batter.
Heat a frying pan over medium heat and add a splash of oil. Drop tablespoon-sized scoops of cookie dough into the pan, flattening them into discs. Fry cookies until they’re a light, toasty brown on each side. Cookies keep up to a week in an airtight container at room temperature.
Next up
Next week it’s the latest edition of I dream of a dessert menu, documenting the tastiest and wackiest regenerative bakes I’ve peeped recently. Then—gird your pie pans!—the Thanksgiving bake-storm begins.
I’ve gotta try to make these cookies!