Oat biscuits

Alongside gingerbread, Väike Väänik oat biscuits are Maris Gilden AS’s highest-volume product. In 2020 we will bake roughly 200 tonnes of them. Besides Estonia, we have exported the product to Lithuania, Greece and Germany.

A biscuit with a long and colourful history across Europe

The oat biscuit has a slightly bitter note and is not as sweet as most biscuits. The recipe itself comes from 17th-century Scotland and soon spread across the whole continent. During the First World War, Australian housewives developed the original recipe further to create a highly nourishing biscuit that would keep for a long time – which is how the oat biscuit came to be called the “soldier’s biscuit”.
The universality of the oat biscuit is also shown by the fact that it is produced locally in almost every Eastern European country. In Western Europe, its place is taken by the “digestive” type of biscuit. Because the recipe is rather simple, it is often eaten as an everyday baked good, almost like bread or barley flatbread. For Russians, the oat biscuit is a snack that goes with tea (“к чаю”). Together with gingerbread and ring biscuits, it is still the staple on the tea table. The fact that our best-selling item is the big 500 g pack of oat biscuits speaks for itself! Older Russian sources recommend combining oat biscuits with honey or jam (understandable), but also with puréed soup and salted salmon (meh!).
Maris Gilden currently offers plain oat biscuits and oat biscuits with raisins. Oat biscuits with pumpkin and linseeds are in development. Thanks to its slightly bitter taste and grainy texture, the oat biscuit works very well as a cake base or in a layered dessert – our oat biscuits are used, for example, in Smackers cake bases. To make a cake base out of biscuits, all you need to do is crush them in a blender and mix in butter until the mass is mouldable yet stable enough for a base (roughly 2 parts biscuit to 1 part butter).

Oat biscuits contain:

Ingredients: wheat flour, sugar, margarine (palm and rapeseed oil, water, emulsifier: mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, acidity regulator: citric acid, flavourings, colour: carotenes), oat flour (10.8%), raising agent: E500, salt, cinnamon, antioxidant: citric acid.
The product keeps for 120 days at room temperature in unopened packaging.