PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES

FOR US, THE BEST PEANUT BUTTER COOKIE IS crisp around the edges, chewy in the center, and slightly puffed. The flavor is buttery and sweet with a strong hit of peanuts.

We started our tests by focusing on the fat. Butter accentuated the peanut flavor, while margarine and Crisco lessened it. The Crisco made the cookie chewier in the center, but we felt the loss in peanut flavor was not worth the added chewiness. We tried peanut oil (thinking this might boost the overall peanut flavor), but the texture was dry and sandy.

From these early tests, we noticed that peanut butter types replicated the results we found with fats. Natural peanut butters with oil on top made the cookies sandy. Commercial brands, which contain partially hydrogenated vegetable oils that are similar to Crisco, made the cookies chewier. We tested both smooth and chunky peanut butter and felt chunky brands contributed more peanut flavor.

We tried using more peanut butter (we even used all peanut butter and no butter), but we still could not get a strong enough peanut flavor. Clearly, we would need peanuts as well as peanut butter. We found that chopped peanuts tend to slip out of the dough. We then ground them in the food processor and worked them directly into the dough, which greatly improved the peanut flavor.

Salt brings out the flavor of peanuts (salted, roasted peanuts taste better than unsalted nuts), and we found that salt also helped bring out the flavor of the peanuts in the cookies. In fact, we found it best to use both salted nuts and salted butter for the strongest peanut flavor.

At this point, we focused our attention on the sweetener. We had been using granulated sugar but wondered if a liquid sweetener might make the cookies chewier. We tried molasses and corn syrup but they could not beat granulated sugar. We tried brown sugar but found the resulting cookies to be too sweet and candyish. However, because the brown sugar did make the cookies taste nuttier, we decided to test half brown sugar and half granulated sugar. This turned out to be ideal, giving the cookies a mild praline flavor that highlighted the flavor of the peanuts.