Stella D'oro Cookies, Bag by Bag: Counts, Calories and Allergens

Nine cookies make up the Stella D'oro range here, and each comes in the same kind of bag: a clear window, the Italian tricolor behind the name, and a small cup of coffee near the bottom. The window shows the shape of the cookie. Everything else is printed on the back.

The back panel gives the count, the weight of a serving, the calories and sugar in it, the ingredients, the allergens and, on the front again, the kosher mark. Set the panels side by side and the bags stop looking alike.

Under the name, each bag carries a narrow ribbon with the name of its line. There are three of them. Breakfast Treats is a line of one, the Original biscuit. Coffee Treats covers the two toasts, the sponge and the Roman Egg Biscuits. Cookies takes the sweeter bags: Swiss Fudge, Margherite, Lady Stella and Almond Delight.

The ribbon is a fair first sort. Breakfast Treats and Coffee Treats are plain or lightly flavored and built around a cup. The Cookies line brings chocolate, icing and sliced almonds. The first two lines stand together under Breakfast & Coffee Treats, and the third under Cookies.

The spread is wide. One cookie from the Lady Stella bag weighs about 8.7 g, and the bag holds about 33. One biscuit from the Roman Egg Biscuits bag weighs 31 g, and 11 fill it. Three pieces from the first bag weigh less than one from the second.

Breakfast Treats Original is the bag most people start with, and the one with the most ratings in the catalog: 4.5 out of 5 from 4,120 ratings. It is an S-shaped egg biscuit with a light vanilla flavor. The label counts one biscuit as a serving: 21 grams and 80 calories.

It is plain on purpose. There is no icing and no filling, and the sugar comes to 6 grams a biscuit. Buyers describe a crisp outside and a softer, cake-like middle, and coffee or tea tends to come up in the same sentence.

Roman Egg Biscuits are the larger cousin. One biscuit weighs 31 grams, half again as much as a Breakfast Treat, and carries 130 calories. The shape is a short bar, scored across the top and baked golden. About 11 fill the 12 oz bag.

Opinion on this one splits, and the split is about texture. Some buyers call it dry and made for dunking. Others expected a softer biscuit and rate it low. It holds 3.7 out of 5 from 97 ratings, the lowest score among the nine bags. If you eat cookies dry, read its reviews before you order.

Three bags in this line come as half-moon slices. Two of them are toasts, sliced and baked dry until crisp. Almond Toast has pieces of almond in every slice. Anisette Toast is flavored with anise, the seed that gives Italian coffee cookies their licorice note.

Anisette Sponge looks like the toast and eats differently. It is a soft, airy slice with the same anise flavor. Buyers who choose it over the toast use two words for it: spongy, softer. A serving is 2 slices, 25 grams together, and the bag holds about 14.

The toasts and the sponge are the leanest cookies in the range by their own panels. A serving of any of them carries 1 gram of fat. Their ingredient lists name no oil or shortening at all: the fat comes from eggs, and in Almond Toast from almonds.

A toast is hard when eaten dry. That is the design, and it is also the complaint heard most often about this line: a few buyers found a bag harder than they remembered. If you do not dunk, the sponge or a Breakfast Treat is the safer pick.

How each of them behaves in a cup, and how many to set out for guests, is worked through in Stella D'oro and Coffee.

Swiss Fudge is a small scalloped cookie with a round of chocolate fudge in the center. About 18 fit in the 8 oz bag. It is the richest cookie here by its own panel: three of them make a serving of 170 calories with 8 grams of fat.

Margherite Combination is two cookies in one bag, a vanilla bar and a chocolate bar, both ridged along the top. The 12 oz bag holds about 24. Buyers call them crunchy and good for dipping. You get both flavors together and cannot order one alone.

Lady Stella is the assortment. One 10 oz bag mixes mini Margherite in vanilla and chocolate, marble cookies, chocolate cookies and iced citrus cookies with sprinkles. The cookies are small, under 9 grams each, so a bag holds about 33. An assortment picks the mix for you, and the favorite shape always runs out first.

The name is older than most of its buyers. A Lady Stella trademark for cookies and biscuits was registered in 1956, and the record gives April 15, 1953 as the date of first use. That registration has since lapsed, though the cookie is still sold.

Almond Delight is the largest cookie in the Cookies line: a round of 28 grams with sliced almonds baked onto the top. One is a serving, at 140 calories, and a bag holds about nine. The front of the bag reads artificially flavored. The ingredient list names almonds, natural and artificial flavoring, and benzaldehyde.

Serving sizes on these bags run from one cookie to three, so the calorie lines cannot be compared as printed. Divide each line by its count and they can.

Per cookie, the lightest is Lady Stella at about 40 calories, because the cookie itself is small. The heaviest is Almond Delight: one cookie is the whole serving, at 140 calories.

Weight for weight, the order changes. Almond Toast is the lowest at about 323 calories per 100 grams, with the other toast and the sponge close behind, because they carry almost no fat. Almond Delight reaches 500.

That line from the FDA matters here more than usual. A serving of Swiss Fudge is three small cookies, and a serving of Almond Delight is one large one. Neither number tells you how much to eat. It is the amount the panel was calculated for, and you may put more or less on your plate.

Sugar on these panels is added sugar. On the six bags of the current design, the total and added lines match, and the panel puts one serving at 12% to 22% of the Daily Value for added sugars. The toasts sit at the top of that range, since a dry cookie is mostly flour and sugar by weight.

The rest of the panel is quiet. Sodium runs from 60 to 115 milligrams a serving, fiber is zero or under a gram, and protein is 1 to 3 grams. Breakfast Treats is the one bag with a mineral worth a line: 140 milligrams of calcium a biscuit, 10% of the Daily Value, from the calcium carbonate in its ingredient list.

One word on every panel deserves a second look: about. The Swiss Fudge panel says about 6 servings of 34 grams, which makes 204 grams. The net weight on the front is 226 grams, room for about two more cookies than the panel counts.

All nine lists open the same way: enriched wheat flour, then sugar. Eggs are in every one of them. From there the bags divide by fat.

Five bags use palm oil: Breakfast Treats, Swiss Fudge, Margherite, Lady Stella and Almond Delight. Roman Egg Biscuits list vegetable oil that may be canola, palm or soybean. Almond Toast, Anisette Toast and Anisette Sponge list no oil.

Color comes next. Yellow 5 and yellow 6 are on seven of the nine lists. The bags without them are Roman Egg Biscuits and Almond Delight. Several lists add caramel color, and Lady Stella adds beet juice concentrate for the pink icing.

Yellow 5 is one of the additives the FDA watches for sensitivity reactions:

Two fronts carry the words artificially flavored: Almond Toast and Almond Delight. Each contains real almonds, and each ingredient list also names benzaldehyde, the flavoring that gives almond extract its taste.

Calcium propionate, a preservative, is on eight lists, every one except Swiss Fudge. Some panels spell out its job in so many words: to extend freshness. Cocoa processed with alkali is the chocolate in Swiss Fudge, Margherite and Lady Stella. Soy lecithin closes almost every list.

The bags of the current design add one line under the ingredients: contains bioengineered food ingredients. The same line explains itself, saying that the ingredients from soy and sugar come from genetically modified crops. An older Anisette Toast panel words it as partially produced with genetic engineering. The term has a legal definition:

Every one of the nine panels ends with a Contains line, and three allergens appear on all of them: wheat, eggs and soy. Two bags add tree nuts, and each names the nut: almonds.

The law asks for that level of detail. A label cannot stop at the words tree nuts:

Three panels carry one more sentence: produced in a facility that handles milk, peanut, tree nuts. It stands on Anisette Toast, Anisette Sponge and Roman Egg Biscuits. The FDA calls lines of this kind advisory statements.

No ingredient list among the nine names milk, peanuts or sesame. That is all the nine printed lists can tell you. An advisory line is voluntary, so a panel without one tells you nothing either way about the bakery.

Recipes change, and bags of an older design stay on sale beside newer ones. Go by the panel on the bag you receive.

Next to the net weight on the front of all nine bags sits a small circled U and the word PAREVE. The circled U is the certification mark of OU Kosher. The word beside it names the category:

For a kosher kitchen that settles a practical question. A pareve cookie can follow a meat meal or stand beside a dairy one. OU adds that an item marked with its symbol and no suffix can be assumed pareve. These bags spell the word out anyway.

Pareve is a kosher category. People with a milk allergy sometimes read it as a promise that a food is free of milk, and it does not say that. Three of these same bags carry the facility line about milk. If milk is a medical matter in your house, the allergen statements decide, and so does your doctor.

With the panels read, the choice comes down to what the cookie has to do.

The scores run from 3.7 to 4.5. Praise repeats two things: a taste people remember from years back, and coffee. Many buyers add that the cookies have become hard to find in their local stores.

The low ratings repeat two things as well. The first is breakage: cookies that arrive in pieces. The second is price, when a single bag costs more than the buyer remembers paying at the grocery store.

Long-time buyers add a third theme, and it cuts both ways. Each bag gets compared with the one they remember. An Almond Toast buyer thanks the brand for keeping to the recipe. An Almond Delight buyer counts fewer almonds on top than there used to be. A Lady Stella buyer opened an assortment that was mostly plain chocolate, with none of the sprinkles.

Price is the part you can check before you order. Every pack is worked out by the ounce and by the cookie in Stella D'oro by the Bag or the Case.