OATMEAL COOKIES

WHEN DEVELOPING THIS RECIPE, WE wanted an oversized cookie that was chewy and moist. Most oatmeal cookies seem dry to us, and the flavor of the oats seems too weak. Many recipes don't call for enough oats, and spices often overwhelm the flavor of the oats that are there.

The flavor issues were easily solved. We tested various amounts of oats and found that in order to have a real oat flavor, we needed a ratio of two cups of oats for every cup of flour—far more oats than most recipes use.

To keep the focus on the oats, we decided to eliminate the cinnamon, a common ingredient in most recipes, because it was overpowering the oats. We wanted some spice, however, and chose nutmeg, which has a cleaner, subtler flavor that we liked with oats.

Our cookies tasted good at this point, but we needed to work on the texture. In our tests, we found that a high proportion of butter to flour helped to keep the cookies moist. We settled on two parts butter to three parts flour.

We found that shaping the dough into two-inch balls (rather than dropping the meager rounded tablespoon called for in most recipes) helped keep the cookies moister and chewier, especially in the center, which remains a bit underbaked in an oversized cookie.

Our final tests involved the sugar. We experimented with various amounts and found that adding a full cup each of both brown and granulated sugar delivered the best results, a cookie that was especially moist and rich. Sugar makes baked goods moister and more tender because it helps them hold onto water during the baking process. In addition, sugar encourages exterior browning, which promotes crispness.