Butterscotch and Potato Chips

An unlikely pair that make a seriously tasty cookie.
By John Fladd

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Bob needed a favor – a special, essential, no-kidding-around favor. And Mr. Sterling was the only one who could help him out.

Which he had no intention of doing.

“I've already told you, I'm a busy man,” Sterling said. It's not going to happen, Robert.

“You only say that because I haven't given you THIS, yet,” Bob said, presenting him with a small, wooden box with a flourish.

Sterling raised an eyebrow, and opened the box to reveal a dried lump of…something, about the size of a cigarette lighter. It was greyish tan, with flashes of jewel-tones scattered across its surface.

“And what is this?”

“I’m so glad you asked,” Bob said with a bright smile. “THIS is a specimen of the extremely rare Upper Mississippi Transgressive Fungus.”

“Is it edible?” Sterling asked suspiciously.

“Of course!” Bob reassured him.

Sterling relaxed visibly.

“In the sense that it will fit in your mouth,” Bob amended.

This resulted in a hard stare.

“It’s rather special,” Bob explained. “It was highly valued in Native medicine as a potent, but unfortunately sometimes fatal aphrodisiac.”

This was one of Bob’s cardinal rules of negotiation - lower the other person’s expectations before hijacking them with something substantially better. (In truth, the mushroom was just a dried morel with its pits painted with brightly colored cocoa butter.)

Sterling silently set the mushroom aside and stared patiently at Bob, who let the silence continue for a slightly uncomfortable length of time.

“Or,” Bob continued, as if nothing untoward had happened, “There are these.” He produced a pastry box containing a dozen large, extremely thin cookies.

BUTTERSCOTCH AND POTATO CHIP COOKIES

John Fled / Heavy Table

This is a recipe adapted from one by Christina Tosi of Milk Bar.

150 grams (about 90 percent of a 7-ounce bag) of salt and pepper kettle chips, crushed into cornflake-sized pieces – so, eat a small handful of the chips, then pour the rest into a bowl and crush them lightly with your fist
1 cup (two sticks) butter
1¼ cups (247 g) sugar
2/3 cup (132 g) brown sugar
1 large egg
1 Tablespoon good scotch – I like Glenlivet
1¾ cups (210 g) all-purpose flour
½ tsp baking powder – Yes, this is a very small amount; these are going to be large, thin cookies
¼ tsp baking soda
1¼ tsp coarse salt
1¼ cups (125 g) mini marshmallows – about half a bag
2/3 cup (122 g) mini chocolate chips
10½ ounces (300g) butterscotch hard candies

Break up the butterscotch candies. This will be the most tedious part of this recipe. After a lot of experimentation, I’ve found that the most efficient way to do this is to lay five to 10 of the wrapped candies on your counter and tap each of them with something heavy — in my case the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, which is the rough size and shape of a billy club. The idea here is to break each candy into three or four pieces, not to crush it to powder. Empty the pieces from their wrappers into a cereal-sized bowl. If you have a young but greedy child, offer to pay her one cent for each wrapper they empty. This will speed things along, and if they have the attention span to stick with it, it will set you back about three bucks.

Cream the butter and sugars together with your electric mixer, then whip on high speed for several minutes, until the mixture is light and fluffy. These cookies are going to spread out very thin, so beating air into the dough will help equalize things.

Add the egg and the scotch, and whip on high speed for another few minutes. You will probably want to scrape down the sides of the bowl at some point during this process. These cookies are complicated enough; they don’t need the emotional bitterness of cookie dough that got stuck to the side of the bowl and felt left out.

Mix in the dry ingredients — the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Start slowly, or they will puff out and cover you and your counter with flour, leaving you looking like a character from a classic Warner Bros. cartoon. You’re mixing this until it just barely comes together into a “shaggy” dough.

Mix in the butterscotch pieces, the marshmallows, the chocolate chips If you have a modest-sized mixer, the bowl may come alarmingly close to being completely full. Don’t panic. Mix things together as well as you can, then stir the potato chip pieces into the mixture by hand.

Form the dough into 2-inch balls – about the size of golf balls -  and flatten them slightly into small mutant hockey pucks. Cover them with plastic wrap and chill them for at least an hour.

(At this point, you might have some leftover debris in the bottom of your bowl that wasn’t doughy enough to form into balls. You can bake this at 350°F for about 10 minutes to make a crumbly topping for ice cream. You won’t be sorry.)

Heat your oven to 350°F.

Place four or five chilled cookie pucks on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat, spread as far apart as possible — they will spread a great deal. Bake on the center rack of your oven for about 12 minutes., until the edges have browned slightly 

When you take the cookies out of the oven, they will look like a mess. Don’t panic. Let them cool entirely before removing them from the pan. If, unlike me, you don’t own an unreasonable number of baking sheets, when the cookies have cooled for 10 minutes or so, gently slide the parchment paper onto a cool counter, and lay down a new piece of parchment on the baking sheet.

These cookies require a bit of effort to make the first time around, but they are totally worth it. They are outrageously thin, yet chunky; crispy along the edges, but bendy and chewy, overall. The butterscotch is shockingly good. 

Making these will become an event.

Still suspicious, Sterling took a cookie from the box, sniffed it cautiously, then took a bite. He chewed thoughtfully. 

He set the cookie on the desktop in front of him and studied Bob, who, knowing he had taken his best shot, stood in silence.

“I’ll see what I can do.”