Notes: The recipe for Momofuku Milk Bar's corn cookies is pretty widespread (countless websites, in the Milk Bar cookbook, in the Lucky Peach magazine) so there's lots of recipe bloggers who have made it. And while it's been on my to-do list for some time, it wasn't until a trip to MEC on the weekend where I was able to pick up a crucial ingredient, freeze-dried corn. Unfortunately, it only came in little 28g snack packs that sell for $2.40 each, so I needed a bunch to make up 130g for a double-batch. In the future, I'm going to buy it in bulk, but the only places that seem to sell it are survivalist websites at about $23 for 454g. Milk Bar, which opened in Toronto this past summer, sells the corn already ground into powder. Their website says it's $6 for 280g, so it looks like Momofuku offers the best value!
Back to the cookie: a few supermarkets I checked didn't carry corn flour, but I eventually found it at our local Italian grocer. My son helped me pulverize the freeze dried corn in a spice grinder, and we then mixed it together with the rest of the dry ingredients. One interesting thing about this recipe is the extended time spent creaming the butter, sugar and eggs, about 12 minutes in total. I formed the cookies on one half-sheet pan, and refrigerating it along with the bowl with the rest of the batter.
Note that the linked recipe instructs you to press down the cookies before baking, while the version in the Lucky Peach magazine does not. Definitely press them down: otherwise, the insides of the cookies will be slightly underdone by the time the edges have browned. Eighteen minutes at 350°F in a convection oven produced well-browned edges on my cookies. In the future, I would reduce the time by one or two minutes. And a note on yield: her recipe in Lucky Peach says using a 2.75 oz scoop will make 18 cookies. This is definitely wrong. The linked recipe says 13 to 15 for the same quantity of ingredients. I only got 15 cookies per batch using a #20 scoop which is much smaller.
The verdict? So good. I ate two right out of the oven with a glass of milk. The intense corn flavour is predominant, but you also notice how buttery, sweet and salty it is. The office loved it too:
OH: "Who needs a bouncy castle when we have @gnufmuffin?!" #shopifyTO
— Craig Miller (@craigmillr) November 21, 2013Besides eating them, there are recipes in this issue of Lucky Peach for making a grilled ham-and-cheese using the cookies instead of toast, and also smushing the cookies as a crust for an ice cream pie. I'll have to try these someday.
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