Meals Overview: Three New Basic Cookies

You deserve a cookie. All of us deserve a cookie. Life is difficult, simple pleasures are few and fleeting—why not have a little bit one thing candy? Naturally, we don’t wish to waste our time on an unworthy cookie. As with every New York Metropolis foodstuff, you might go for established sublimity, mannequin cookies of universally agreed-upon excellence. Name them the outdated guard: your gooey chocolate-chip cookies from Tradition Espresso, your buttery pineapple Linzers from Té Firm, the legendary black-and-white from William Greenberg (although, if we’re being trustworthy, the model at Orwashers Bakery outperforms, on the deserves). However, if you end up wanting one thing a little bit completely different, these three are, to my thoughts, the New York cookie new guard: recent classics within the making.

The Rye-Caraway Chocolate-Chip Cookie at Agi’s Counter

When Agi’s (a tiny, revolutionary Ashkenazi-ish restaurant with a stand-alone bakery counter) first opened, just a few years in the past, I felt that my life was modified, on some tiny however vital stage, by their shortbread cookie, a crumbly disk of butter and sugar shot by means of with a gruff be aware of caraway seed. Caraway is an audacious cookie ingredient; the flavour is licorice and citrus, tuned to a minor key; it’s maybe most well-known because the ingredient most individuals don’t need in a loaf of Ashkenazi-style rye bread. In a candy framework, although, it turns into wild and intriguing. Agi’s phased out the shortbread final yr in favor of a caraway-studded chocolate-chip cookie, and I used to be skeptical that the perfection of the previous iteration may very well be improved upon. What a thrill to be taught that the present providing is in some way even higher: the chocolate’s fringe of bitterness, the molasses notes of the brown sugar, the sly sourness of rye flour within the dough—the caraway belongs on this cookie, it feels inevitable and ingenious and proper.

The Guava Cream-Cheese Piecrust Cookie at Janie’s Life-Altering Baked Items

It’s uncommon to get true structural innovation on the earth of cookies—for all our experimentation in bizarre and wondrous flavors, the cookie’s basic pastry unit stays kind of the identical. The piecrust cookie at Janie’s (which opened its first brick-and-mortar store in 2021, and now has three Manhattan places), nonetheless, actually is novel: a candy filling, often pie-inspired, sandwiched between a circle of flaky piecrust, on the underside, and an insulating layer of streusel, on prime. Certain, it’s acquired all the weather of a pie, however in some way (perhaps attributable to its teeny-tiny, barely two-inch-diameter measurement) it’s resolutely not pie—it has that important, ineffable high quality that the cookbook creator Ben Mims identifies in his forthcoming baking opus “Crumbs” as “the soul of a cookie.” I haven’t tried a single selection right here that I don’t roundly adore (cranberry apple ginger! Apple and honey!), however maybe probably the most impressed is full of guava and cream cheese, an obvious riff on Cuban pastelitos, with the heady, sticky depth of the tropical fruit simply barely tempered by the sleek schmear. (Nice information for the far-flung: Janie’s does mail order, although, alas, not for the guava cream-cheese taste, owing to perishability.)

The Cannibal Cookie, at Purple Gate Bakery, encompasses a basic butter dough and items of Oreo-style cookies in lieu of chocolate chips.

The Cannibal Cookie at Purple Gate Bakery

Discovering myself in pressing want of a showstopping present for a cookie obsessive not way back, I turned to Charlotte Druckman, the meals author and coauthor of the pastry e-newsletter “The Sweethearts,” for steerage. Her reply was three phrases: Purple Gate Bakery. The tiny Decrease East Aspect store, open since 2019, is the place the baker Greg Rales seems creations which can be equal components childhood nostalgia and willful weirdness, although all the time exquisitely scrumptious. His cheekily named Cannibal Cookie begins with a basic butter dough, however as an alternative of chocolate chips or bits of walnut he stirs in crushed Oreo-style cream-filled sandwich cookies (additionally offered on the bakery). It’s a cookie-spiked cookie that encompasses a rousing mishmash of textures and flavors, with the first cookie’s golden face damaged up by a crazing of chocolate-black from the mixed-in bits of cookie No. 2. A dozen of them, wrapped up in a field, made a triumphant present. ♦