At the Kentucky State Fair, the Chocolate Chip Cookie Is King

Two days before the Kentucky State Fair opens to the public, tables are piled high with food. Event staff are still putting up signs, and a news photographer bustles around a low row of elaborately decorated cakes. Around it all, a dozen people in blue-checkered aprons buzz and eat everything.

“It’s every child’s dream and every adult’s nightmare,” Mindy McCulley said.

McCulley usually works in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Kentucky. But today? She’s a chocolate chip cookie judge. With 69 plates of cookies in front of her, she takes her job seriously.

“We didn’t have a big glass of milk with us, first of all,” she said. “Secondly, 69 cookies is a lot of cookies.”

Kentucky Public Radio has been analyzing data collected for years. While people are fascinated by cakes, the humble chocolate chip cookie contest is consistently one of the most popular baking contests. It easily gets more than 100 entries each year. This year, more than 110 people signed up for the contest, though about 80 of them actually entered them.

McCulley is a tough cookie herself. She limits the number of participants with ground rules, such as that each participant must send exactly four cookies.

“So it could be that they have too much, their plate is too big or it just doesn’t comply with the rules,” she said. “So it’s very easy to weed those people out.”

Next, she looks for visual appeal. McCulley wants cookies that are uniform in size and brown in color. Some cookies simply look tasty—maybe they’re thick or have little flourishes like finishing salt.

“You can see, there are a lot of beautiful cookies here, but they might not taste like Blue Ribbon,” she said.

McCulley and his co-judge Jeanne Badgett treat the tasting like a fine wine. Just a little bit and then they spit it out. But what is this blue ribbon I don’t know what?

“With my chocolate chip cookies, I like them to be a little chewy in the middle and crispy on the outside,” McCulley says. “But when you taste them, you realize there might be way too much baking soda, or way too much salt, or, you know, something you can really taste.”

After all that, only one cookie can be the best. This year, it was Aaron Shawler, 39, of Taylorsville, who received the blue ribbon.

“What! This can’t be!” he cried as he read an email from the fair’s officials telling him he had won. “I don’t even know what to think right now! I know it’s just a cookie contest, but this is huge for me.”

Shawler said he’s been perfecting his grandmother Betty Jean’s recipe for four years now. The biggest change he made was using a mixture of shortening and butter instead of just butter. He also added a pinch of water to help the sugars dissolve.

Shawler said he had joked for years about entering the fair, but this was the first time he remembered to register.

Despite all this preparation, the clock did not ring for the winning lot.

“I look at the cookies, they come out and I’m like, ‘Oh, they’re burnt.’ So I set them aside and make another batch. After the next ones are done, I come back and taste the first ones and I’m like, ‘That’s it!’” he exclaims. “That’s the one!”

Watching Shawler work in the kitchen, you can see that he has mastered the art. He never even glances at the recipe.

He carefully mixes the dry and wet ingredients, adding them little by little. Then he stirs in the chocolate chips—a mixture of semisweet and milk chocolate.

“Well, here it is,” he said, holding up the finished cookie dough. “This is exactly the same thing I made to win the fair.”

Normally, Shawler freezes the dough for about a day. But we couldn’t wait. The dough went into the oven. About 15 minutes later, we had a piping hot batch of Kentucky’s best chocolate chip cookies.

Shawler let reporter Giselle Rhoden take the first bite.

“Oh my God,” she said, the cookie making an audible crunching sound in her mouth. “This is delicious. If you want a cookie your grandmother made, this is it.”

Even Judge McCulley would have been jealous. Rhoden washed down that warm cookie with a glass of cold milk.