Simkin: Girl Scout cookies de-mystified

If you’re like most people, Girl Scout cookies are a commonplace, albeit delicious, aspect of… If you’re like most people, Girl Scout cookies are a commonplace, albeit delicious, aspect of everyday life. However, if you’re a food columnist and/or someone concerned with random trivia  — I, myself, am both — there is something deeply perplexing about them. Specifically, they seem to have multiple personality disorder.

Girl Scout cookies have different names depending on where you purchase them, with no immediately discernible geographical pattern: one troop sells Caramel deLites, while the troop across town might be selling Samoas. The explanation for this, although disappointingly un-sinister and not involving any secret, age-old Girl Scout rivalry, is a bit complex.

Since 1917, the Girl Scouts of the USA have raised funds for their organization with cookie sales, originally baked by the girls themselves but later by professional bakeries, according to the organization’s official website. Today there are two separate Girl Scout Cookie distributors, Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Bakers, each using a different recipe to produce extremely similar cookies.

Every Girl Scout regional council decides which licensed baking company to use for cookie sales within its geographical area, as well as which cookie varieties it will make available from said baking company.

The Girl Scouts of the USA requires that three varieties be sold everywhere: Peanut Butter Sandwiches or Do-Si-Dos — respectively from Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Bakers — Shortbreads or Trefoils and the ubiquitous Thin Mints, which go by no other name and is estimated to account for as much as 25 percent of total cookie sales. Although some beloved favorites like Caramel deLites/Samoas and Peanut Butter Patties/Tagalongs are almost always available, the rest are at the mercy of the council.

For now, let’s focus on the obvious issue at hand: Which brand is better? A chance confluence of key elements allowed for a fair comparison: a box of cookies I purchased from a local troop selling ABC Baker varieties, a box of cookies mailed to my roommate from a Little Brownie Bakers council region and several midterm papers that no one wanted to write. The Peanut Butter Pattie vs. Tagalong challenge was on.

The differences begin before one even opens the boxes. Despite featuring the same photograph of smiling girls appearing to exercise teamwork skills through basketball or some other Girl Scout-y activity, the packaging reveals different nutritional contents: A single serving of Little Brownie Tagalong cookies is 140 calories, whereas the ABC Peanut Butter Pattie serving contains a mere 130.

One might be inclined to assign additional merit — brownie points, if you’ll pardon the pun — to the cookie variety with the no-nonsense, contents-explaining name as opposed to the specimen with the camp-song epithet that gives no indication as to what manner of baked good it is.

A side-by-side comparison of the cookies themselves will reveal that, although roughly identical in size, Peanut Butter Patties have a clearly paler milk-chocolate hue, while the chocolate coating of the Tagalongs is darker in color. No real favorite as of yet, unless the calorie count is a deal-breaker for you — really, it’s the cross-section analysis where the differences become pronounced.

The Peanut Butter Pattie’s luxuriously thick chocolate coating hides a dense interior vanilla cookie featuring barely a divot of an indentation to house the all-important peanut butter, which is itself of a dry, crumbly nature. The Tagalong’s vanilla cookie base is light and crispy with a deeper cavity filled with a generous helping of creamy peanut butter — which one might speculate accounts for the increased caloric content.

In a scientifically rigorous blind taste test, “judges” claimed to be able to distinguish a taste difference and expounded upon the virtues of the various consistencies and chocolate-to-peanut butter ratios. In a less formal grabbing-a-cookie-from-whichever-box-was-closer experiment conducted later, there was no clear winner.

For what it’s worth, my own personal loyalty remains with the Peanut Butter Patties — the cookies I sold for years in support of Bluebell Troop 1212, often door-to-door from a sled during a blizzard for maximum sympathy sales.