My Morning Chocolate

The cookies on the left were made with store-bought butter and eggs; the ones on the right are made with Farmer's Market butter and eggs.

At my Farmers’ Market, there’s a dairy, South Mountain Creamery, that sells cream, milk, and butter. I love to bake and have been wondering if using fresh butter and eggs from a local source would make cookies taste better.  So I did this experiment.

I bought South Mountain Creamery’s unsalted butter – “European style butter” made with real cream and 42% butterfat, according to their website – and fresh eggs from the Farmers’ Market. Then I went to the grocery store to buy Lucerne unsalted sweet cream butter and organic, free-range eggs.

South Mountain Creamery's butter crumbles slightly when you scoop it, unlike store-bought butter.

For my experiment, I used the Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe – admittedly not the best choice because the strong flavor of the chocolate chips makes it hard to cleanly taste the cookie. I made the batter twice, once with the Farmers’ Market ingredients and once with the store-bought ingredients.

I had intended to let the two butters soften for the same amount of time; however, the Creamery’s butter is sold in a tub, thus does not require softening. The store-bought butter softened for 45 minutes.

Other variables – the flour and sugar used, the size of the cookies, the amount of chocolate chips in each batch – were the same.

Once baked, I thought the Farmers’ Market cookies were fluffy and fresh.  They had more body and heft to them then the cookies made with store-bought ingredients.  I liked them better.  But I also wasn’t a blind taster.  I knew the difference between the cookies when I tasted them.

So I had family members and friends taste a sample from each batch. To help them get a clean taste, I broke the cookies apart, giving them a chocolate chip-free portion of cookie to try. Across the board, my testers said they couldn’t tell a difference between the two cookies.  Both tasted good (have you ever had a chocolate chip cookie that didn’t taste good?), but they couldn’t say that one was better than the other.

According to my testers, Farmers’ Market butter and eggs do not significantly improve the taste of a chocolate chip cookie.

However, Farmers’ Market butter and eggs are better in many other ways – you are supporting your local farmer; and the butter and eggs are hormone and antibiotic-free, made from free-range chickens (in the case of the eggs) and often organic.

And the South Mountain Creamery’s butter tastes amazing on toast, fresh and rich, perfect with a sprinkling of Celtic sea salt. Yum!

If you are in Baltimore, you can buy South Mountain Creamery’s products at the Saratoga Street Baltimore Farmers’ Market on Sundays.