Food You Can Eat: Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

Editors note: This is the first of four days of peanut butter and/or oatmeal cookie variations – it will be a very yummy week.

First things first:  This is one of the recipes from my grandmother’s recipe box.  My plan with the family cookbook is to make a number of the recipes myself so that I can include a few pictures as well as verify the instructions are correct.  A lot of her recipes—including this one—are just lists of ingredients with little to no actual instructions.  My experience as a once-upon-a-time professional baker certainly helps with the baked goods recipes.  For the entrees and other recipes, it’ll be more a process of error and error.

A caveat before we get started:  You’ve probably heard that when it comes to baking, it is critical to use exact measurements.  While this is true, I would argue that it is even more important to use the proper techniques.  I could give ten random people this very same list of ingredients and very likely get 10 different outcomes in terms of texture, flavor, doneness, etc.  There are only two ways to do things here—my way and the wrong way—so please just do what’s written here and don’t get cute.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 Cup Butter, softened

¾ Cup White Sugar

1 Cup Brown Sugar, packed

2 Eggs

1 Cup Natural Peanut Butter (not that Jiffy shit)

2 Cups Flour

½ tsp. Salt

2 tsp. Baking Soda

1 Cup Rolled Oats

Using an electric mixer, cream butter while adding white sugar in a steady stream, then add the brown sugar slowly, and beat until light and fluffy.  Add eggs, one at a time, and peanut butter and beat well. 

In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt, and baking soda.  Stir slowly into creamed butter mixture.  Add rolled oats and mix thoroughly. Then scrape down the bowl and paddle with a rubber spatula and mix again for another 30 seconds or so.

Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto a greased or parchment lined cookie sheet.  Using the teaspoons, shape the dough balls into a more-or-less round and cohesive shape.  If you just plop them down any old way, then there are parts of the cookies which are likely to burn when baking if the shape isn’t even.

Fill a coffee mug with water.  Using a dinner fork, dip the fork into the water and press down onto each dough ball in a cross pattern.  It is best to dip the fork in the water after each press (so, two dips per dough ball), just to be sure the fork doesn’t stick to the dough.  You’ll have to be a little patient and let the dough slide through the tines when lifting the fork, but it’ll release—just don’t lift the fork up too quickly.

Bake in a 350-degree oven for 8-12 minutes, depending on how your oven performs.  I have an electric oven and baked these for 10-11 minutes.  The edges of the cookies should just barely start turning brown.  If they are darker around the edges than what’s in the picture here, then bake your next tray for a minute or two less.  Remember, cookies continue to cook even when they are out of the oven, due to the heat lag present in both the cookie sheet and the internal heat of the cookies themselves.  You want these cookies to be crisp—not crunchy.

Let them cool on the tray for about 4-5 minutes, then transfer with a spatula to a cooling rack.  Try to hold yourself to eating only ten of the still-warm cookies with milk for quality control.