Mattituck resident and chef Eliot Ramirez recently unveiled a new line of cookies made on the North Fork called Marooned Morsels.
“[The new company] is a passion project of mine,” says Ramirez. “Every chef has a few things they specialize in, and one of mine is a chocolate chip cookie. I always had some form of a large one on my dessert menu, like maybe a milk punch cocktail and a large cookie at a cocktail bar,” he says.
The International Culinary Center-trained chef grew up in Manhattan on the Upper West Side and has worked at various fine dining restaurants and wine bars throughout New York City.
“My father was a chef for over 30 years; he is retired now,” says Ramirez. “He mostly did catering for productions. I grew up hanging out at his truck on sets for movies, television and commercials.”
Ramirez moved to Mattituck two years ago and has worked at Terra at the Greenporter, the Mediterranean-influenced café and bar at the Greenporter Hotel, and at Southold General, the upscale café and gourmet market on Main St. in Southold.
At his last New York City job, a neighborhood café on the Upper West Side called Crossbar, he created a cookie that went viral.
“Growing up as an Upper West Sider, it’s very common to bring a box of Levain cookies to someone’s house as a gift,” Ramirez says, referencing the popular bakery New York chain known for their cookies. “I figured I could do the cookie thing and do it bigger.”
Ramirez started baking three types of chocolate chip cookies: milk, dark and white chocolate. “We were selling 40 or 50 of these giant cookies the size of your palm a day.”
Influencers on Instagram and TikTok began clambering to Crossbar for the cookies, and their posts made them even more popular. “People would actually wait 25 minutes for the cookies so that they could buy several,” Ramirez says.
But after a year and a half, Ramirez needed a change, and he and his wife Amanda moved to her parents’ house in Mattituck.
“We wanted a yard for our dogs and a change of scenery,” he says, of their pups Eloise, a boodle, and Lola, a goldendoodle. Lola volunteers at San Simeon as a therapy dog and will be working at the Southold Library’s children’s dog toy program as well.
While Ramirez’s cookies were on the menu at Terra at the Greenporter and at Southold General, “it’s always been a dream of mine to package them,” he says. For now, he makes the cookies at his home with a home processors license.
“I did my first popup October 12 at Rowan’s [Craft Boutique] Autumn Stroll in Feather Hill,” says Ramirez, where his cookies turned out to be a hit with customers.
The business’ name, Marooned Morsels, is something Ramirez came up with while brainstorming with his wife and mother-in-law. “If you read my bio [on the package], I drifted east and somehow ended up on the North Fork,” he says.
The cookies come in several varieties, including seasonal flavors like pumpkin spice white chocolate chunk, and are $10 a bag. They can be found at the Southold and Greenport IGA and at Center Cuts in Mattituck.
For more details, follow Marooned Morsels on Instagram.
