momofuku milk bar corn cookies
Confession time: making cookies is actually one of my greatest baking challenges. It seems silly, but maybe the fact that it's such a staple dessert makes it hard to perfect. Knowing this, (and being slightly ashamed of myself), I set out to try to discover the secret to cookie baking. I'd read about baking soda vs. baking powder, brown sugar vs. white sugar, freezing dough vs. baking immediately, but it all seemed like too many variables to test. So I just decided to start with following the recipe.
To begin this journey, I attempted a rather ambitious recipe: the Momofuku Milk Bar Corn Cookie. In case your reaction to this was "...wat", the Milk Bar is a dessert restaurant in NYC, specializing in American desserts, such as cake, cookies, and ice cream. The head chef, Christina Tosi, has made a name for herself, pushing out unique and creative dessert flavors that make you question how you have lived this long without knowing about these. A prime example of her ingenuity is the corn cookie. It's sweet, a little salty, and a lot corn-y. After trying it for the first time a few months ago, I thought to myself, this is basically cornbread in cookie form, shouldn't be too hard to make.
Well. I was wrong. This innocent looking cookie requires some rather exotic ingredients, like freeze-dried corn powder and corn flour. And no, corn flour is not the same thing as corn meal, which is used to make cornbread. Who knew there were so many things you could get from corn? Anyway, I was determined to see it through without skimping on the ingredients, so I dropped some big bucks and ended up with a three pound bag of freeze-dried corn. Yum. (Seriously though, it's like insanely sweet and crunchy corn kernels. Good thing I have three pounds of it.) The corn flour wasn't too hard to find either, and was like a finer version of corn meal.
The first time I attempted these cookies, I followed the recipe* to the tee, whipping the butter for the right amount of time, grinding up the freeze-dried corn into powder, measuring everything with my new handy dandy kitchen scale. And the result was rewarding. The cookies turned out quite similar to the Momofuku cookies, albeit slightly over-baked. So lesson one: cookies are a recipe-based food, meaning the recipe is not a suggestion.
I decided to test that theory in my subsequent attempts at making corn cookies. Well, "decided" is a strong word. I subconsciously started to fall back into the habit of cutting sugar from the recipe. If it called for a cup of sugar, I would put in 2/3 cup, or 3/4 cup, anything but the full cup. Somewhere, it was ingrained in me that sugary sweets might not be so bad if there was less sugar. Not surprisingly, the resulting cookies were sub-par to the first batch, becoming too cake-like and crumbly instead of chewy and compact. Yikes. I tried other things to try to offset the crummy-ness. Packing the dough more firmly, increasing the butter to flour ratio, refrigerating for longer before baking, but it never quite worked. So lesson two: sweets are called sweets for a reason. Sugar can't really be compromised.
So my first cookie recipe attempt ends with a sigh of resignation. It seems that the perfect cookie requires a rather rigid recipe, one that can't really be messed with, at least when it comes to the fat and the sugar. At the end of the day, these ingredients are important for the constitution of the dessert first, and its taste second. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this yet, but I think it takes some of the fun out of experimenting. But then again, there are a lot of cookies to be tested.
Until next time,
M
*Christina Tosi released her recipe to the public, so any recipe for Momofuku Corn Cookies you find on Google is pretty much the same. This is the one I used. https://www.savorysimple.net/momofuku-milk-bars-corn-cookies/
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