The best oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Ever.

Is it hubris to call these the best oatmeal cookies ever?

I’m taking a page straight out of the books of two women whose blogs I read and whose verve and style I greatly admire: Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman) and Pim Techamuanvivit (of Chez Pim), who’ve laid respective claim to the best chocolate sheet cake (and the best lasagna. Ever.) and to a pie dough that “rule[s] them all“.

I’m no Pioneer Woman; I’ve admitted as much in Pâticheri’s inaugural post. Nor any Chez Pim–and yet I’m daring to make so bold a claim, even without a fraction of the following that these brave women command. Why? Well both because of what these cookies are, and what they represent. Allow me to explain?

Lemon Pistachio Pretzels: early baking experiments which turned out wonderfully, but which were not marketable for having short shelf lives

A couple of years ago, a couple of years after we’d left Houston for Pondicherry, I started working with a local NGO called Sharana, thanks in large measure to a very dear friendship with its founder president, Rajkala Partha. Sharana targets children who are school drop-outs: compelled by alcoholism, impoversishment, and abuse to abandon studies and work in menial jobs for even more menial wages, exposed to the harshest vicissitudes of life, with no guarantees and even fewer of the protections we so glibly take as “rights.” Sharana’s approach is wholistic: helping children from such circumstances often also means helping their parents and their families. Where I first got involved was in a fledgling café project, working with two women who had stories of their own, in an effort to generate some income for the organization while imparting a skill, and providing two people with a means to a livelihood in the process.

I’d love to be able to report that the project had a skyrocketing success, all the more because of its socially conscious, non-profit moorings, but who’re we kidding? This is the neoliberal universe we inhabit, lavish in its possibility but ruthless in its market-oriented methods. Besides, restaurants these days merely starve on shoestring budgets, and common wisdom about the poor success rates of new eateries isn’t invalidated just because the restaurant is a social project. After much trial and error, many twists and turns; after three years of barely breaking even or running in the red, the project finally folded.

That final outcome, however, cannot be taken as a sign that it had no successes. And for me, personally speaking, the oatmeal cookies were one of them.

They started out regular oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, of course. But they were too sweet for my tastes, all the more since unsweetened chocolate chips aren’t available here. Brown sugar was expensive, but more mineral-rich than white. Good food, made with good ingredients, is costly stuff–and it was a constant struggle to find ways to keep expenses in check so as to ensure something of a profit margin. Next, when the cookies were being bought monthly by a donor to send to a hundred children at a local orphanage, it became all the more necessary to enhance their nutritive value. Sure, oatmeal was good. But couldn’t there be more? We experimented with adding ragi flour–flour made from finger millet, as it’s known in English–known widely for its rich protinaceous content. We worried about color, about the tendency of ragi to turn the stiffest doughs watery, about baking times and temperature control in the small ovens with which we were working, about the cost of ingredients balanced against the need for nutrition, about how much people could justifiably be asked to pay for cookies, about the cost and look of packaging, about shelf life, about quality control and reproducibility.

whole ragi & ragi flour

The result of all our anxious experiments is what you see featured in this post. A crisp hardy ragi oatmeal chocolate chip cookie, relatively low in sugar and high in nutritional value. Fantastic with ice cold milk, or your afternoon cup of black coffee. Or just on its own, a sweet wholesome mid-morning snack that holds out so much promise: although the cookies were often sold to those for whom these were hardly such rare delights, it was also a joy to know that kids who had barely any access to even the ubiquitous Indian “chocolates” (as toffees and candies are commonly known here) were also getting such rich, lovingly home made treats. For me, the true profit of this exercise was not monetary, but that it brought such things into worlds that had precious little access to them at all. My kids and the kids in the orphanages, living across almost insurmountable divides, could share in a bite of the same stuff and for perhaps just those fleeting moments, experience a similar enjoyment.

The rest, as they say, is history. Many people in town bought the cookies from Sharana. Many, many gave us delightful compliments, calling them things like “the best chocolate chip cookies in South India.” Many wrote asking for the recipe–which I’m divulging at last because we never went about this work in a proprietary fashion, though I confess I’ve never felt so posessive about a recipe ever before. Not for myself, you understand, but for the organization that provided the context for this recipe to emerge in the first place.

So, now that you know the story of the cookies, tell me: is it hubris to call these the best oatmeal chocolate chip cookies ever? Well, I think it isn’t because they are. Not just because they taste so excellent, but because they’re ultimately more than an invitation to gastronomy. They’re ways to reach out beyond our small confines. They’re ways to develop a social conscience. They’re ways to bring rare enjoyments to little children. They’re ways to remain true to the promise of good food, and to act on the belief that good food should be for everybody. That’s ultimately why these cookies are so special: because they represent such wide and rare possibilities as these. Bake the cookies, let us know how they turned out, and send Sharana your vote of confidence–in whatever capacity you possibly can. And then tell us if that isn’t the most satisfying taste you’ve relished in a long while.

Click on the image below to pull up the larger version [large images
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of the recipe follows below.

[See image gallery at www.paticheri.com]

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