Dish of the Week: Otterbein’s Chocolate Chip Cookies
Where: Giant, Magruder’s, Wagschal’s

One of the better known cookies from Baltimore is Berger’s – a soft cookie slathered in fudge frosting. It is a cookie for the true frosting or fudge lover. It can be overwhelming, which is why I tend to go for another company’s cookies – Otterbein’s Bakery. If you were like me, you might have glimpsed the red bag at the grocery store and thought these were just like any other mundane chocolate chip cookie. And there’s where you would be wrong. Otterbein’s chocolate chip cookies are baked to a perfect thin crispness that even underbaked cookie lovers could learn to appreciate. The cookie is a perfect balance of flavors, just sweet enough with a golden butteryness and just the right hint of salt. They aren’t exactly chock full of chocolate chips (though oddly in these cookies they like to cluster together), but the dough in between is so great that it makes no difference.

Otterbein’s started in Baltimore in 1881 churning out various baked goods, including sugar cookies. They eventually expanded outside of the plain sugar cookies into ginger snaps, oatmeal raisin, and chocolate chip. The cookies themselves show evidence of how relatively small the operation is. The ginger snaps and sugar cookies come out in odd shaped shards, and the batches don’t seem to always look exactly the same color. But even when they aren’t precisely the same, the cookies are still excellent, a great thing for locavores and cookie lovers alike.