Soft & Thick Peanut Butter Cookies Recipe - Sally's Baking Addiction (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to making cookies soft and chewy? ›

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

This may not sound like a lot, but it is enough that it can affect the quality of your cookies – adding too much peanut butter can make them dry, hard, and crumbly.

My cookies came out dry and crumbly. What did I do wrong? Possible reasons include over-baking, improper peanut butter consistency, using a smaller egg, or inaccurate ingredient measurements. To avoid this issue, monitor baking time, mix natural peanut butter well, use a large egg, and measure ingredients accurately.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

If you bake too many cookies (as if there is such a thing!) and are concerned about them going stale, just add a slice of white bread to the storage container to keep them from hardening.

You don't absolutely HAVE to use bread flour, but it adds a ton of chewy texture to these cookies that's worth the extra trip to the store. If you can't get bread flour, then use all AP flour in its place.

Soft – Dough that's “soft” or “runny” can be thickened by adding one or two tablespoons of flour to your mix. This will help keep your batch from “Spreading” and coming out of the oven looking like flat, not-so-cookie-like puddles.

Yes, shortening yields chewier cookies than butter does, because butter contains water and shortening doesn't. But you can easily make up for butter's crisping tendencies by using crucial ingredient No. 3… Brown sugar instead of white sugar.

Check the consistency — if it seems too thick or dry, add oil, a teaspoon at a time, until you are happy with it. 1Roast the peanuts as directed in the basic recipe above, then add them to the bowl of a food processor. Process them for 1 minute, then scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula.

If you don't flatten the cookies first, then the fork does double duty – it performs both functions. One very subtle result of creating the pattern is that the little tips of dough bake up crisper than the rest of the cookie, giving you both a bit of additional texture and deeper taste where the dough is more baked.

Why don't peanut butter cookies need flour? ›

I was shocked to discover that these peanut butter cookies were flourless. But if you think about it in terms of baking theory and pastry techniques, it makes sense—peanut butter contains so much fat that it doesn't really need that much flour for structure and gluten.

Peanut butter cookie dough is stiff and will not spread out while baking (the way chocolate chip cookie dough does). Using the long tines of a fork and pressing down on the dough ball twice , one vertically and one horizontally, flattens the dough evenly and leaves attractive marks.

So it looks like that there are utilitarian reasons for the cross-hatching—to allow for even cooking—but it might have been passed along for nearly a hundred years for primarily aesthetic reasons, where the cross-hatching is more to identify the cookies as peanut butter ones, rather than to cook them well.

Cook's Illustrated recommends baking peanut butter cookies with products from traditionally creamy brands like, you guessed it, Skippy or Jif. Such butters have smooth, consistent textures that easily combine with any cookie dough.

If the dough seems too soft, chill it for 10 to 15 minutes before baking. Use shortening instead of butter or a combination of the two if you don't want to sacrifice that buttery flavor. The dough was too wet. Using the wrong size egg could also add extra liquid, resulting in too much spreading.

Different types of sugars affect the texture because they absorb different amounts of water. Remember moisture is the key! White sugar creates crispier cookies and brown sugar creates chewier cookies.

Baking soda is typically used for chewy cookies, while baking powder is generally used for light and airy cookies. Since baking powder is comprised of a number of ingredients (baking soda, cream of tartar, cornstarch, etc.), using it instead of pure baking soda will affect the taste of your cookies.