The Best Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to a good cookie? ›

To guarantee they'll turn out, I recommend using a classic creamy peanut butter like Jif or Skippy as they have a very consistent consistency across all jars. Otherwise, use a thicker natural peanut butter.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

Peanut Butter Cookie Mix Hacks

Easy Add-Ins: After creating the dough according to the peanut butter cookie mix instructions, try introducing 1 cup of add-ins like REESE'S PIECES, toffee bits, dried fruits, mini marshmallows or even cooked bacon bits, if you're feeling adventurous!

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.

The best cookies have layers of texture. A slightly crisp outer shell that holds up to some heat with an inner core that's soft and chewy. Premium cookies taste great at room temperature, straight out of the fridge or slightly heated. Creating cookies in small batches is key.

But this peanut butter also scores higher when it comes to the nutrients that it provides. Most notably, Jif provides 17 milligrams of bone-building calcium, while SKIPPY does not have any. On the other hand, SKIPPY contains less saturated fat and still contains ample amounts of nutrients like protein.

Not enough fat

If your cookie dough is too dry and crumbly, it might not have enough fat. This is a common problem with recipes that use all-purpose flour. To fix this, you can add more fat to the dough. This can be in the form of butter, shortening, or even olive oil.

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.

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.

Why do my peanut butter cookies not taste like peanut butter? ›

The most common mistake with peanut butter cookies is using the wrong type of peanut butter. The BEST peanut butter for today's cookies is a processed creamy peanut butter, preferably Jif or Skippy.

Why Do You Put Fork Lines in Peanut Butter Cookies? Our Test Kitchen experts say the fork lines are there to help peanut butter cookies cook more evenly.

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.

Dry – “Dry” or “Crumbly” dough is a product of over-mixing or using too much of any ingredient during the mixing process. This can be reversed by adding one to two tablespoons of liquid (water, milk or softened butter) to your mix.

Your other source of fat should be butter, not shortening. Butter will make your cookies taste buttery; shortening will make them taste suspiciously vacant, like Katy Perry's voice post-autotune. Yes, shortening yields chewier cookies than butter does, because butter contains water and shortening doesn't.

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.