This Cheddar Cookie Is Better Than Red Lobster
If you don’t have taste buds and a heart, you probably love the bread basket. A good free bread served before meals not only whets the appetite; it engenders loyalty. Case in point: I’ll go to the Red Lobster. These cheesy, salty, aggressively flavored Cheddar Bay cookies are worth a visit on the seafood chain, but you can actually make them at home and make them better.
If you want the quick and dirty, there is Red Lobster’s signature blend. I have nothing against the mixture, but I was curious if the convenient route with added water would work. Will the mixture make a cookie worthy of the Red Lobster name? Or is there an even better homemade cookie recipe found online?
Homemade is n’t always the best in our brownie flavor test , but I thought these Queen Martha cheddar cookies were a good starting point. I made a mix first. It was just a matter of adding water and cheese, stirring until the shaggy dough was just forming, and dolloping from a 1 part / 4-cup parchment-lined baking sheet. I baked them until they were golden brown, then smeared them with a mixture of butter and everything in that mysterious seasoning bag.
They certainly looked the part, and when they were freshly removed from the oven, they tasted almost exactly like the cookies you would get in the Red Lobster franchise. The box emphasizes that they need to be consumed immediately , and after they cooled down, I understood why. When the biscuit is at room temperature, the taste becomes muted, the texture becomes pie-like, and – if you eat more of this – a headache sets in (at least that’s what happened to me). If you needed a quick ride. to Cheddar Bay, and were confident that you could quickly eat a few cookies before they cool down, this box mix is a good choice.
But with a little more time and effort, you can end up with much better, buttery, cheesier cookies. I didn’t need 16 cookies, so I cut Miss Stewart’s recipe in half. If you also want to make eight cheesy buttery clouds of joy, you will need:
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon white sugar
- A pinch of cayenne pepper (I didn’t halve its original size, it was a pinch).
- 3 tablespoons cold butter, cut into chunks
- 3 ounces chopped hot cheddar
- 1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons buttermilk
- 1 1/2 tablespoons garlic, chopped
Whisk all dry ingredients together, then add butter to the mixture using a pastry shop or by hand, until the butter is completely mixed and “pea-sized lumps” remain. Add cheese, buttermilk and garlic and stir until combined. Place 1/4 cup servings on a parchment lined baking sheet and bake at 425 ℉ for 15 minutes, until cookies are golden brown.
Although Martha didn’t say so, I peeled these babes with a mixture of 2 tablespoons of ghee, one teaspoon of garlic powder, and one tablespoon of garlic. It was a good call from me. In short, they were excellent when they first came out of the oven. They didn’t quite reach the height of the box-mix cookie, but I was too focused on flavor to care. While the boxed biscuits were on the verge of the supernatural compared to the biscuits found in Cheddar Bay, their beauty faded in minutes and they just weren’t as deliciously cheesy and buttery as Martha’s. (For a self-proclaimed cheddar goblin, stupidity is important.)
The cheddar in these miracles of carby stuck out here and there, forming lovely little fritos around the cookie. This, combined with the flavor of real garlic and zesty buttermilk, made this one of the best drip cookies I’ve ever tasted. (They were still delicious the next morning, which is another thing that matters to me.)