Fat Pants Friday: Bouchon Bakery's Nutter Butter
Open wide.
After a couple of underwhelming Fat Pants Friday forays, we're happy to report that Bouchon's Nutter Butter has completely restored our faith in the healing powers of sweet, fatty baked goods.
Bouchon's spin on the Nutter Butter is by this point legendary: It is to the Nabisco original what 450-count Frette sheets are to a roll of toilet paper. Its building blocks are deceptively ordinary: two peanut butter cookies the size of helicopter landing pads sandwich an obscene amount of butter, peanut butter, and confectioners sugar that has been whipped into a submissive frenzy.
Simple, but as with all of Thomas Keller's creations, not necessarily easy to achieve. That's particularly evident in the chewy but just-crispy-enough cookies, which contain just the right proportions of peanut butter, chopped peanuts, and oats -- they're less peanut butter cookie than buried childhood memory of a mythical peanut butter cookie that probably never existed.
The filling is neither too sweet nor too buttery, and has the texture of a bolt of silk. The bakery could make a killing selling jars of it on its own, though such a move would probably make the Time Warner Center resemble a methadone clinic.
Altogether, it's a cookie for the ages, to say nothing of a Friday. Its impressive size and rich ingredients (which can be had for $3.50) rate a pair of sweatpants on the Fat Pants scale -- not to mention a mattress to collapse upon in cheerful ruin.
Bouchon Bakery
Time Warner Center, third floor
10 Columbus Circle
212-823-9364
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