Absolute Scratch
A cookie made with every single part from absolute scratch
We took six weeks to bake a chocolate chip cookie because we made every ingredient from absolute scratch.
We boiled the ocean to make salt; we chopped, squeezed, and simmered sugar cane to make sugar; we skimmed cream straight from a cow and shook it in a jar to make butter. We even had a farmer in Puerto Rico mail us cacao pods so that we could roast and grind our own chocolate with a mortar and pestle. Where we couldn't make the ingredient ourselves, we sourced it as directly as possible from the earth. We found a baking soda mine in Colorado where NaHCO3 exists naturally underground. We drew the line of “from absolute scratch” at ingredients — we didn't refine our own oil for natural gas for the oven (although when you start to think about it, “from scratch” is always arbitrary).
This cookie took six weeks to make.
This project started when Julia and I were trying to figure out where our ingredients come from. We wondered who were the people, and their processes, that make the ingredients that we eat every single day but don't notice or think about.
Most of us start making a cookie “from scratch” by purchasing ingredients from the grocery store. When we get home, we mix everything together, roll the dough into balls, and put them in the oven. But how do you bake cookies from absolute scratch? When you think of each ingredient originating from the earth, a cookie opens the door to an expansive, and often invisible, food system. A humble $2 bag of flour hides a whole agricultural network, and we wanted to see it.
We quickly realized that cookies are everywhere, but they aren't simple to make. They are a product of modern industrial agriculture. Thousands of people, machines, and kilowatts of power go into producing these ingredients. We wanted concrete answers to simple questions. How many square feet of wheat does it take to make one cookie? Spoiler alert, we counted: roughly four stalks, so about one square foot.
Butter
Butter came first. We knew that butter comes from cream, and cream comes from milk, and milk comes from cows (and people and all sorts of other mammals). But we weren't trying to make human butter. Neither of us owns a cow, so we emailed local dairies to see if they wanted to help make this cookie. Shoutout to Oake Knoll Farms in Foxborough, MA, who said yes! We met a very cute cow, brought half of her morning milk home (she produced 2 gallons, we took home 1), and we started getting jiggy.
10 minutes of milking.
At home, we left a gallon in the fridge for 48 hours so the cream would rise. We skimmed the cream off with a spoon and used a straw to pull out the milk left underneath.
Wow, a gallon is so much milk.
Then we shook the cream in a jar for about ten minutes, until it split into butter and buttermilk. Our apartment was about 90°F, which didn't help.
Butter islands and a milky sea.
We cleaned the butter in ice water to remove the remaining buttermilk, and set it aside.
Oh, so painfully cold.
Butter math
1 cow (Ayrshire).
10 minutes of milking.
Produced 2 gallons of milk, 6% fat (but normal cows produce 4%; our cow was late in her lactation cycle).
We used 1 gallon of her milk.
We skimmed it into 2 cups of cream.
This churned into a little less than 1/2 cup of butter.
Sugar
We chopped, squeezed, and simmered sugar cane juice to make unrefined brown sugar.
Salt
We boiled the ocean to make the sea salt.
Flour
We wrote to dozens of wheat farmers and eventually someone told us about Muster Field Farm. We were introduced to its curator, Heidi, who replied with the same enthusiasm we felt for the project. She invited us to drive up from Cambridge, MA one sunny morning in July, suggesting that we bring sunhats and gloves, and get to work.
Upon arriving at the farm, Dave, one of the farm managers, taught us everything we needed to know: how to sharpen a sickle, how to grab the wheat stalks in one hand and slice at the base with the other, and how to tie them into a sheaf using a strand of wheat. We spent the next four hours crawling on our hands and knees across 2000 square feet of field, listening to the birds, and popping raw grains into our mouths for sustenance. At the end of the day, we had harvested an entire cartload, which we jammed into the trunk of our sedan and headed back to the city. We were sweaty and exhausted. People did this to survive, with these tools, for most of human history. Then the insanity began. How do you process wheat into flour in an urban apartment? We first tried separating the wheat berries by hand at our kitchen table. Three people took an hour to process three tablespoons. There had to be a better way. We built a bucket thresher using a paint-stirring drill bit with chain links attached to it. Then, we invited all of our friends over to help us cut the heads off of every single stalk so they wouldn't gum up the thresher. We couldn't help but think, “potatoes are easier sources of food.” We winnowed the chaff away by standing outside of the exhaust fan that expelled heat from the clothes dryer in our basement. We poured the grains from one bowl to another, creating a snowstorm of chaff on our back driveway. Our local chickadees loved eating whatever we dropped. Then, we hand-sorted the berries to remove any of the unthreshed ones that had snuck through. After a week, we had 20 pounds of processed wheat and it was time to grind it into flour.
We quickly realized that our vertical-handled mortar and pestle were no match for the hard wheat berries, so we ran them through our coffee grinder. Once we had a grainy powder, and the motor on our grinder was smelling of burnt toast and engine oil, we sifted the flour through a fine mesh tea strainer to remove some of the bran, yielding just enough for a single batch of cookies. When we came back for Farm Days in August, we were able to manually grind a few more cups of wheat ourselves, realizing that every part of making flour is brutal, muscular work.
Shoutout to our friends and family who helped process the wheat.
An entire cartload, which we jammed into the trunk of our sedan.
Eggs
We made a local friend who keeps chickens in her backyard. The chickens are friends, not food.
Chocolate
Jeff is an organic farmer in Puerto Rico. He mailed us four cacao pods. We tried to ferment two of them, but fermentation is tricky and may require greater scale than this – ours turned moldy fast. The other two we simply roasted, then ground them with a mortar and pestle, and mixed them with some of our sugar to make chocolate, which we piped out of a bag into chips.
Baking it off
At last, we had the final ingredient to make our cookies! So we baked them... and they worked. They held together. They didn't disintegrate in the oven, light on fire, or char. But my goodness did they taste weird. They were so flavorful – too flavorful. They tasted like the earth. You could taste the cow in our butter; the molasses in our sugar; and the sweet, nutty field in our flour. We also made a control batch using store-bought ingredients to make the same recipe, and they tasted nearly flavorless next to our earthy cookies. However, at the end of the night, the cookies made from industrial products were all eaten, and much of our absolute scratch batch remained on the baking tray.
We started this project with the hypothesis that scale is inherently inhumane: that any system sufficiently large, like industrial agriculture, loses its warmth and care. But after spending six weeks and a thousand dollars to make a cookie, we realized that large-scale systems have a very humane side. A $2 bag of flour means you can feed yourself without spending all of your time and money on survival. We also realized that there were two things missing from our own process: expertise and equipment. We were unskilled at each step of turning a raw material into an ingredient. Industrial agriculture prioritizes consistency over flavor, and efficiency over human connection. Our absurdly bespoke ingredients prioritized flavor and human connection, but required too much time, skill and money to be viable. There must be a middle path. What would cookies taste like if we worked with local specialists to create each ingredient from their own raw materials at their own scales?
| Wyatt Roy | Co-creator |
| Julia Mattis | Co-creator |
| Xavaar Quaranto | Salt, Wheat |
| Terri, Oake Knoll Farms | Butter |
| Dave, Heidi, and Jody from Muster Field Farm Museum | Flour |
| Tropical Foods Co | Sugar |
| Jeff, Buena Fruta Farm | Chocolate |
| Anara | Eggs |
| Roy McClung, Natural Soda | Baking Soda |
