Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe - Crunchy Creamy Sweet (2024)

FAQs

What makes cookies crunchy or soft? ›

Butter contributes milk solids and water to a cookie, both of which soften it. Brown sugar contributes molasses – again, a softener. Using lower-moisture sugar (granulated) and fat (vegetable shortening), plus a longer, slower bake than normal, produces light, crunchy cookies.

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.

Peanut butter

Peanut butter cookie / Main ingredient

Using more white sugar in your cookies will result in a crispier end product. To achieve a crispy cookie, skip the rest in the fridge. Baking your cookies right after making the dough will encourage them to spread in the oven, resulting in an extra-crispy cookie.

The ingredients you use and how you shape your cookies both play an important role in whether your cookies turn out crispy or chewy. The type of flour and sugar you use, if your cookie dough contains eggs, and whether you use melted or softened butter all factor into the crispy-chewy equation, too.

How Sugars Behave in Dough. In recipes that involve baking soda, the primary role of acidic brown sugar is to react with sodium bicarbonate and produce carbon dioxide, making cookies thick, puffy, and soft (cakey at first, then crunchy if they continue to bake).

You didn't press the batter down before sliding them into the oven. Your cookies will end up chewy when you leave the batter as-is. How can I make my cookies crunchy? Adding more butter to your recipe, baking your cookies longer, and letting them cool on the baking sheet will help give you crunchier cookies.

Too much butter makes cookies turn out just as you'd expect: very buttery. This batch of cookies was cakey in the middle, but also airy throughout, with crispy edges. They were yellow and slightly puffy in the middle, and brown and super thin around the perimeter.

If you use too much butter, the cookies will end up flat and greasy. And if you use too little flour, the amount of butter and sugar will be proportionally too high, meaning the cookies will spread for the aforementioned reasons.

Why do they put fork marks in peanut butter cookies? ›

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.

Peanut Butter: It's best to use a processed peanut butter like Jif creamy or Skippy creamy. I do not suggest using natural style, oily peanut butter. Crunchy peanut butter adds peanut chunks as well as a more crumbly texture.

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.

Sugar. If you are seeking a softer and taller cookie, try substituting brown sugar for white sugar. It melts and caramelizes faster than granulated sugar. Granulated sugar will give you a crisper, thinner cookie.

Double Your Yolks Most cookie recipes call for at least one egg. You can try omitting the white of each egg, which tends to dry out when baked, and replacing it with an additional yolk. Plus, egg yolks have more fat than egg whites, which helps to keep your cookies moist and chewy.

Baking powder cookies: These were extra thick and tall, not chewy, more fluffy, and not quite as flavorful. Baking soda cookies: These cookies were well browned with slightly crispy edges, chewy interiors, and regular thickness. They didn't stale as quickly so they were more shelf stable.