The Best Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the best peanut butter to use for cookies? ›

Peanut butter: Creamy peanut butter is ideal for this recipe because crunchy peanut butter creates an overly crumbly cookie. You can use processed peanut butter such as Jif or Skippy, or natural-style peanut butter.

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.

Chill your cookie dough! The dough is extremely soft due to the creamy peanut butter, eggs, and butter and if it's not cold going into the oven, the cookies will spread all over your baking sheet. I chilled this cookie dough for 24 hours and my cookies were soft, thick perfection.

The fork marks also encourage the cookies to bake more evenly and brown evenly. If we skipped that step, these cookies would be so thick that they'd barely spread, and they may not bake all the way through.

Best for Baking

Reese's is one of our Test Kitchen's favorite candies, and it's also one of our preferred peanut butters. Spooning this out of the jar, you'll find that Reese's peanut butter is super thick and creamy. This texture, according to Catherine, makes this brand ideal for baking.

These early recipes do not explain why the advice is given to use a fork, though. The reason is that peanut butter cookie dough is dense, and unpressed, each cookie will not cook evenly. Using a fork to press the dough is a convenience of tool; bakers can also use a cookie shovel (spatula).

If your peanut butter cookies are hard, you likely cooked them for too long. They should not be baked for more than 8 or 9 minutes.

Crisco® all-vegetable shortening will make your cakes moist, pie crusts flaky, and cookies soft and fluffy, with 0g of trans fat per serving*. One look, and you'll see why we've got butter beat.

Firm dough prevents the cookies from spreading too much, which is why chilling the dough is a crucial step for cut-out and rolled cookies. "The colder and more solid the fat is, the less the cookie will spread," says food stylist and recipe developer Caitlin Haught Brown.

We prefer natural peanut butter here, so you can dial in the sugar and salt amounts precisely, and smooth peanut butter over crunchy to better control the cookies' fat and moisture levels. Letting the cookie dough rest ensures the flour is fully hydrated, resulting in crisper edges and chewier middles.

What happens if you don t refrigerate cookie dough before baking? ›

The colder your dough is before it heads into the oven, the less it will spread during baking, which makes for loftier cookies. The chilling phase also gives the flour in your dough time to hydrate, just like pie dough, which translates into a cookie that's more chewy than cakey.

For longer storage, we recommend forming the dough into a large round, then wrapping it in plastic wrap. This will protect the dough from any potential aromas in the fridge. For slice-and-bake icebox cookies: On a sheet of plastic wrap, transfer the room temperature dough.

If you're wanting to use natural (no sugar added) peanut butter, the cookies will be less sweet and they will likely spread out more. Using natural peanut butter will change the structure and texture of the cookies. Why are my cookies dry and crumbly? This is most likely a classic case of using too much flour.

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.

As long as you are choosing a peanut butter that's all natural and pesticide free, in addition to being free from added salt or sugar, any peanut butter will be a healthy choice. However, crunchy peanut butter has a little more fiber and less saturated fat, making it overall more nutritious, even if only slightly so.

Several uncited studies report most people prefer smooth peanut butter to chunky peanut butter. The National Peanut Board says people living on the East Coast prefer creamy peanut butter, while those on the West Coast prefer the crunchy style.

Most Americans use smooth peanut butter in PB&Js. I prefer the extra crunchy stuff -— it provides a lovely layer of texture against the soft white bread and gloopy jam. Whether you opt for smooth or crunchy is a matter of personal taste.

Why are my cookies dry and crumbly? This is most likely a classic case of using too much flour. It's crucial to properly measure the flour in this recipe, as even 1 extra tablespoon of flour can completely change the structure of the cookies. You also might have over baked them!