Courtesy of the New York Daily News
https://www.nydailynews.com
Matt Liebowitz didn’t set out to be the dieter’s favorite baker. The founder of Gourmet Lite Bake Shoppe just couldn’t stand being tricked.
In 2005, the 44-year-old Far Rockaway resident owned a small trucking company delivering baked goods in New York City. He spent some of his time behind the wheel snacking on his favorite “fat-free” biscotti – cookies that hid a dirty caloric secret.
“A few customers made comments to me like, ‘Are you sure this is fat-free? I don’t feel like I’m losing weight on it and it’s my only snack,'” says Liebowitz.
Suspicious, Liebowitz forked over $500 for lab testing. Not only were serving sizes underestimated, but each gram had almost twice the calories listed.
The cookie company – Liebowitz won’t name it out of courtesy – was eventually doomed in a television expos/. But for Liebowitz, a quest had begun.
“I said to my wife … ‘I want to make something myself, package it, sell it and know I’m representing a truly dietetic product,'” he says. “It was a joke, really. I couldn’t bake a Duncan Hines brownie.”
His wife, Judy, called his bluff, and before long Liebowitz sold his trucking route to raise money for his cookie experiments.
“That part’s a little nutty,” he admits. “I’m wondering how I could have been so crazy. I was in my wife’s kitchen for three months. She’d come home and see me in an apron tinkering around with different recipes. At first it was funny, then she started to get angry.”
Worse, things looked grim: Even with the help of a baker friend, Liebowitz found it impossible to balance the ingredients in a way that wouldn’t, as he puts it, “look bad or taste nasty.”
In the end, however, Judy’s taste made the difference. “I did three bake cycles a day. I’d taste each cycle; it wouldn’t taste right, I’d throw it out. Finally, something came out of the oven and I was about to throw it out – I was so in the habit of doing that – and my wife walked by and grabbed a piece and said, ‘Wait a minute, this is good.'”
No trans fat, no saturated fat, no cholesterol, no dairy, no nuts – but not ugly and not nasty.
Two years later, Gourmet Lite is a 3,000-square-foot bakery in Oceanside making 6,000 chewy cookie bites a week in flavors like chocolate fudge, Liebowitz’s favorite, and cappuccino marble. (They’re available at King Kullen, ShopRite, Zabar’s and Fairway stores.)
Liebowitz admits he has also become an expert baker, at least with the ingredients he knows so well. Next on his list is a whole-wheat, low-fat, high-fiber chocolate chip cookie, once, says Liebowitz, he solves the problem that “there’s no such thing as a fat-free chocolate chip.”
Watch out, Judy, he’s headed back to the test kitchen.
