Contents
Peanut butter, oats, chocolate chips and candy-coated chocolates, with no flour at all. The recipe appeared in the American Midwest in the 1970s, usually in church and community cookbooks and usually scaled to a dozen eggs and a five-pound tub of peanut butter — it is a cookie built for a crowd.
The flourless part is not a gluten-free gimmick that came later. It is original: peanut butter and oats between them supply all the structure the cookie needs.
What makes it work
- Peanut butter is the flour. Its protein and fibre set the dough. Use the emulsified supermarket kind; natural peanut butter separates and the cookie goes greasy. See Peanut Butter.
- Oats must be old-fashioned rolled. Quick oats absorb faster and give a pasty, dense cookie; see oats.
- Rest the dough 30 minutes even though it needs no chill for spread. The oats need that long to take up moisture, or the baked cookie is sandy.
- Add the candy shells on top, not in. Mixed through the dough, the coloured shells crack and bleed. Press them into the tops of the balls before baking.
- Naturally gluten-free if the oats are certified — see Gluten Free Grains.
Ingredients
Makes about 30 large cookies.
- 340 g smooth peanut butter
- 115 g unsalted butter, softened
- 200 g light brown sugar
- 150 g granulated sugar
- 3 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla — see Pure vanilla extract
- 8 g baking soda
- 5 g fine salt
- 400 g old-fashioned rolled oats
- 200 g chocolate chips — see Chocolates
- 200 g candy-coated chocolates, half reserved for the tops
Method
Beat the peanut butter, butter and both sugars until smooth, two minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time and the vanilla.
Stir in the soda and salt, then the oats, then the chips and half the candies. The dough is heavy; a wooden spoon beats a stand mixer past this point.
Rest 30 minutes at room temperature. Scoop 60 g balls, press the reserved candies into the tops, and space them well apart.
Bake 175 °C / 350 °F for 11–13 minutes, until set at the edges and soft in the centre. Cool ten minutes on the tray — with no flour they are fragile hot.
Notes
- Scales linearly and predictably, which is why the church-cookbook versions run to 12 eggs. The dough keeps five days refrigerated and freezes as scooped balls for three months.
- Swap the candies for raisins, dried cranberries, or chopped almonds and the cookie stops being a monster cookie and starts being an oatmeal cookie.
- Keeps four days in a tin with a slice of bread to hold the moisture.
Elsewhere on the site
Method and theory: Cookie recipes · cookies · oats · Peanut Butter
Nearby: cowboy cookies · oatmeal cream pies · anzac biscuits