Sweet!
By NATALIE MIKLES World Scene Writer
11/23/2005

Farrell Family Breads adds decadent, sinful cookies to lineup

Tom Farrell loves to talk about bread, but last week he had cookies on his mind. Just as he worked to win us over with his organic, artisan bread, Farrell is now on a cookie monster's mission.

His decadent 4-inch round, 3-ounce cookies are crispy on the edges, soft in the middle and leave a wonderfully slick imprint of butter on your fingertips.

They're like the cookies you make at home, but better. Farrell said that even his own children, who have proclaimed his cookies the best in the world, prefer the cookies he sells at Farrell Family Organic Bread.

He credits artisan baker Rick Miller for developing the recipes for the five types of cookies -- chocolate chunk, chocolate chunk with pecans, rum raisin oatmeal, shortbread and shortbread with toasted almonds.

"It's the ingredients that make them so good. The last batch I made used 54 pounds of butter," Miller said.

And it's not any old butter, but rather creamy imported French butter. It's also the bittersweet chocolate, rum-soaked raisins, grey sea salt, and organic flour, oats, raisins and pecans.

"Most places make their cookies with shortening or margarine or butter flavor. Even some cookie shops use frozen dough, because it's easy to transport and makes a consistent cookie," Farrell said.

Farrell isn't as interested in consistency, as you can see by the decidedly haphazard look of his small flour-strewn bakery. Just as the breads aren't perfectly rounded or squared off, the cookies have their own homemade imperfections.

Until they are wrapped in cellophane packages of four (for $4.99-$5.99), the baked cookies cool on trays next to the finished breads. Farrell said he used to pride himself on eating a slice of his granola bread for a healthy breakfast every morning. But it seems the cookies have gotten the best of him. Throughout the morning, he eats cookies off the cooling racks -- all part of quality control, of course.

The only problem Farrell could find with making the cookies is that he needed more mixing space. His huge industrial-size stand mixer is fine for mixing bread, but when he needs to mix both bread and cookie dough, it's a problem.

So when the electricians arrived to hook up Farrell's new equally gigantic mixer, he apologized for having to put our cookie talk on hold.

"Sorry, but this is a big moment in baking history," he said.

Farrell and Miller gathered around the cauldron mixer, making sure the paddle was going in the right direction. Once Farrell saw that it was, he summed it all up in one word.

"Sweet," he said.