I’ve been reading about Momofuku Milk Bar compost cookies for a long time and they always get rave reviews. Read the various blog comments closer, though, and most of them are from people saying that the cookies sound delicious, I’ll have to try these, my mom used to make something like this but we called them Garbage Cookies, love the cute packaging you used when you gave them to Anderson Cooper. Comments made mostly by people who want click-throughs to their own blogs, but not by people who have actually made the cookies. I used the recipe from Milk Bar, here (scroll down). Those instructions are pretty friendly: It’s when others interpret the recipe that things can get a bit shouty.
They’re good. The dough is delicious. But they are quite a lot of work, including making a batch of graham cracker pie crust so you can use that in the cookies. The recipe says to use bread flour (higher protein content). I got out the bag of bread flour, but went into autopilot and didn’t realize I’d used regular flour until after the dough had been beating for seven minutes. I dutifully followed all of the directions, including refrigerating the dough before baking. Maybe they wouldn’t have spread so much with the bread flour.
The only thing more horrifying than biting into coffee grounds, for me, would be biting into a pretzel, so I left those out, as well as the butterscotch chips. I used M & M’s, chopped milk chocolate, sliced roasted almonds, and thick, ridged, kettle-cooked potato chips. No glucose in the pantry, so I made the corn syrup substitution mentioned.
The cookies taste good, but not better than a lot of other cookies that don’t require so many different steps and processes and demanding instructions that include a lot of imperative sentences.
Roll chilled dough into 1" balls. Roll balls in sugar. Coarse sugar, like demerara, is especially good.
Place balls 2" apart on parchment lined baking sheet.
Bake at 375° for 10 – 15 minutes. They should have flattened somewhat, with a crackled surface. They will cool to slightly chewy, with crisper edges. If you want the whole cookie to be crispy, bake a little longer.
A heavily adapted recipe from one of my grandmas, who tended to be a bit stingy with the good stuff like butter, sugar, chocolate, and nuts, so I’ve profligately adjusted her recipe so these taste more like the candy that comes wrapped in gold foil and is shaped in little logs.
The Brown-Haley store in Fife, Washington has 10-pound blocks of milk or dark chocolate for $20$25 don’t know what it costs now. Never buy chocolate chips again.
