As you might remember, a few weeks ago I already wrote a post about Győri Keksz, the Hungarian cookie factory. I thought the series should be continued with another emblematic product of the company. Generations have grown up enjoying pilot biscuits, that could also be called as the Hungarian oreo: a cookie sandwich made of yellow and brown disks filled with nougat cream that everyone likes.

The story of pilot biscuits began in 1960. József Telekesi was the factory’s production manager and he initiated to broaden the product range with a new item. He was likely to take the idea from the survival kit of the fighter and bomber pilots who went into battles during the World War II. The survival kit contained crackers and chocolate, which were presumably the source of inspiration.

During the first few years the product was made with a cocoa biscuit and a sponge cake disk, but the size of the sponge cake disk always varied, which was not tolerated by the packaging machines, for this reason sponge cake was replaced with linzer cookie. Pilot biscuits have been produced continuously since 1960, there were changes only in the packaging.

These cookie sandwiches can be reproduced easily at home. You need to make first a pale and a cocoa flavoured linzer dough for the cookies, then a nougat cream that calls for hazelnuts and dark chocolate. In this case the chocolate’s high cocoa butter content is more important than the high percentage of cocoa because using chocolate rich in cocoa butter in the nougat results in a better, creamy texture.