Help me make all-local cookies for Earth Day.

April 1, 2009 7:05 AM

I'm a high school librarian, and I bake cookies for our faculty every Thursday as a lure to get them to come in and chat. For Earth Day, I'd love to do an entirely local cookie, but I need some help figuring out the best recipe. Obviously, it's spring, so fresh local fruits aren't available in general (though I can probably still get local apples from last year). Local preserves are possible.

Ingredients I know I can get from local sources:
- Flour
- Dairy (including butter, milk, cream)
- Eggs
- Honey
- Jam/preserves
- Vinegar (if needed for leavening)

Stuff I'm not sure how to handle:
- Salt
- Other leavening ingredients (baking soda, baking powder)

Ingredients obviously not possible: (among others)
- Peanuts (and a number of other nuts)
- Chocolate
- Citrus fruits
- Vanilla
- Molasses, cane sugar, etc. etc.

Do you have suggestions of favorite or adaptable recipes? Ideas for how to handle the salt and leavening issue? Other ideas for something to try?

Me: I'm a reasonably decent baker (especially after baking cookies every week for the last 2.5 months!) with a very small kitchen and no electric mixer or microwave. I've had good luck with a variety of other recipes.

posted by modernhypatia to food & drink (10 comments total)

Are you sure chocolate is off the list? I ask because we have two local ice cream stores here and both do chocolates as well. I know I could get a bar of plain chocolate and chop it up.

As far as the leavening and salt...where are you? Sometimes our foods are more local than you think. Arm & Hammer comes from New Jersey. Rumford baking powder comes from Terre Haute, IN.

But yeah...knowing where you are would be a big help. You can just be general about it; I don't think we need a specific town.
posted by cooker girl at 7:20 AM on April 1

It's my understanding that even hardcore locavores make an exception for salt (unless, obviously, the locale is salt-producing, which I don't think Minneapolis is known for).

What about a thumbprint cookie filled with local preserves, or a jam-sandwich with wafer cookies? Thumbprints are sturdy and easy to make, the wafer ones a bit more fragile. Here's a honey-sweetened oat-based thumbprint cookie; there's an interesting carrot oatmeal cookie on that site as well, which looks even easier to localize (the fresh ginger being a possible exception - I've never sourced ginger so I dunno about that one).

Googling "locavore cookies" turns up Diary of a Locavore, but she's based on Cape Cod and her cookie recipes use granulated and/or powdered sugar.

Good luck! I'd love to know what you end up making.
posted by catlet at 7:21 AM on April 1

What a great idea! And good for you for being so thoughtful.

I'm sure that you've read Barbara Kingsolver's food memoir, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." Even she had to make some exceptions (coffee, olive oil) to her local diet. Are you willing to compromise and feature a couple of different types of cookies that *feature* local ingredients, but aren't totally local?

Not all of us can go all-local but all of us can make an effort to incorporate more of it. Maybe if you print up small cards (or send an email) with recipes and ingredients marked as locally-sourced, you can get the point across that small steps matter.
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:25 AM on April 1

Try looking at sables or sandies recipes. They generally don't use leavening, and some buttery sables don't use salt. I can't immediately find recipes that use honey instead of sugar, but I'm sure you could work it out. You could use preserves to make them into linzer tarts or sandwiches. Yum.
posted by thirteenkiller at 7:32 AM on April 1

Oh yeah, I suppose I could have looked at your profile. In my defense, my brain isn't working today!

As catlet and MonkeyToes have already suggested, hardcore locavores do make exceptions. There must be a local farmer's market or store or something nearby with staff who would be more than willing to help you figure out what's local and available to you right now. And sometimes you find things in the unlikeliest places: just down the road from us, in the suburbs of Cincinnati, there's a family who makes local maple syrup. The young son also keeps bees and sells the honey to local stores. One of our big local-chain grocery stores identifies products that are local (in this case, Northern Kentucky is considered local because it's just over the river, and there's LOTS of farmland there), which is really helpful.

Dig around a bit and I think you'll get lucky! I love the thumbprint cookie idea, too.
posted by cooker girl at 7:37 AM on April 1

Butter cookies to the rescue!

2 1/2 c flour
1 c butter
1/3 - 1/2 c honey
1 egg

They would benefit from 1/8 t salt or so. But if you could get local salted butter, you could blame the local dairy and get away with it ;)

Usually you'd want vanilla extract or something for flavoring, but usually you'd be using sugar instead of honey, too. The honey flavor might be enough. Call them "honey shortbread" or use them to make thumbprint cookies with a dollop of jam.

You can use these in a cookie press, or refrigerate a roll and slice 1/8 inch rounds. Bake at 325 for about 10 minutes. I make cookies like these without baking soda/powder all the time.
posted by rikschell at 8:24 AM on April 1 [1 favorite]

What about hamantaschen? They are triangular jelly-filled cookies that Jews traditionally eat for Purim. Sub out the shortening for softened butter, and leave the orange juice and zest out of the recipe, and this might be a good recipe for you.
posted by honeybee413 at 10:09 AM on April 1

You can get local sugar pretty easily in Minnesota. Most of the sugar in the area is produced from sugar beets and sold as plain old sugar in the grocery stores. Crystal Sugar sold at Cub comes to mind.

American Crystal Sugar
posted by advicepig at 10:48 AM on April 1

Much thanks for all your answers (and my apologies: thought I'd put the location in, but must have missed it somehow.) I am in fact in Minneapolis.

I wouldn't try to do all-local cookies all the time (though I do, as much as possible, do locally-sourced stuff for the things it's straightforward for - butter, eggs, flour, etc. anyway) But I thought for Earth Day, it might be really cool to try doing all-local. Until I started thinking about salt. (And yes, before anyone asks, I have read Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History. Great book.)

I really like the idea of the butter cookies with jam - I think it'd make a good combo. If anyone has a fabulous maple syrup recipe, I do also have a pint of very local syrup on my kitchen shelf (a good friend taps her own tree.)

As for the rest of it - our outdoor farmer's markets haven't opened for the season yet, but we do have an indoor market and a bunch of co-ops. Just, the times I can get in there, they're usually busy, so narrowing down some of the questions here can help a lot.
posted by modernhypatia at 4:51 PM on April 1

Just wanted to follow up on this one:

I ended up making maple syrup shortbread (a friend taps her tree, so it's very local.) It went over swimmingly. Thanks for all the suggestions, and I'm planning to track down a few things so that when I do this next year, I can do something different!
posted by modernhypatia at 6:26 AM on May 15