Upon her first bite of a chocolate chip cookie from Clear Flour Bread, Melanie said, "Wow, this quest can end now. We found the best cookie in the city." Now, we wouldn't be professional questers if we declared Clear Flour Bread the winner without thoroughly investigating many other cookies in the city, but let me be clear: the bar is set high for all future cookies. Anytime on this quest we eat a cookie less delicious than this one, we're going to wish we had returned to this neighborhood bakery and shared a chocolate chip cookie again.
Clear Flour Bread is a quaint bakery near Packard's Corner. The smell of baked bread wafted outside, and the cute young, male cashier's who waited on us had a flour-covered apron. After we both selected a loaf of bread, we ordered one chocolate chip cookie to split (see picture below for approximate size). Since there was no place to sit inside, we ate the cookie in Melanie's car. After all, it's January in Boston and it's freezing outside, so we had to make-do with what we had.
Clear Flour's cookie was divine. The outside had a perfect crisp while the inside was soft and chewy. The rich buttery texture and smooth, milk chocolate chunks resulted in a cookie that just melted in your mouth. Rarely have I ever had a cookie that had such a perfect combination of crunch on the outside and gooey deliciousness on the inside. Despite the size of the cookie, I immediately wished I had purchased an entire one for myself. I'll run it off in marathon training---right?
As this is our first stop on the cookie quest, we should cover some ground rules. No ranking until we're done, and we will discuss the texture, taste, size, and type of chocolate for each cookie. Bonus points going to things like ambiance and other intangibles. Clear Flour Bread scores extremely highly for everything related to the cookie, and the only negative we had for the place was that there was no inside sitting. But honestly, if it were warmer outside, we probably would have overlooked that entirely because we were so enamored with our cookie. The take-away folks? Get to Clear Flour Bread immediately.
