A Good Eats recipe review of the oatmeal cookies that contain no wheat flour instead made with homemade toasted oat flour. The recipe called for rum soaked raisins but I choose to add chocolate chips instead. Whether you add raisins or chocolate chips, these cookies are the best.
Also find out what I like to add to these cookies at Christmas time!
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The Chocolate Chip reigns supreme as American's favorite cookies.
Trying doing a Google search for chocolate chip recipe. You will be overwhelmed with recipes.
So do we really need another chocolate chip cookie recipe? You bet your bottom dollar that we do!
This isn't an ordinary chocolate chip cookie recipe. Oh no. These are the Oatiest - Alton Brown said it so now it's word - cookies of all time.
❔ What Makes Them the Oatiest?
Alton Brown had a great idea. Replace the wheat flour with oat flour when making oatmeal cookies. They are oatmeal cookies right, so why is there wheat flour in basically every recipe for oatmeal cookies?
The oat flour is made by turning toasted rolled oats into a powder that looks like whole wheat flour. It's super easy to make yourself.
🛒 Ingredients
Here is what you will need for this recipe:
- old-fashioned rolled oats (not quick oats)
- baking powder
- ground cinnamon
- kosher salt
- butter
- dark brown sugar
- pure cane sugar
- large egg
- vanilla extract
- chocolate chips
For the chocolate chips, I recommend semi-sweet chips. I also like the chocolate chunks that you can get at Trader Joe's.
🟤 How to Make Brown Sugar
For the dark brown sugar the recipe calls for, I like to make my own brown sugar with cane sugar and molasses. I wrote about how to do this in a previous blog post.
🌾 How to Make Oat Flour
When I first tried this recipe I actually didn't own a food processor. yet. That sounds crazy to me now.
So I didn't know if I could make the "oat flour". I tried a blender instead. And it still worked. It was a little more work and I had to be careful not to overheat the motor of the blender.
I can attest it does work better in a food processor, but you can do a blender in a pinch.
Start by toasting the oats with either of these methods
- Spread the oats onto a half sheet pan. Bake until the oats start to smell and are lightly toasted. No more than 20 minutes. Keep a careful eye on them.
- Toast the oats in a frying pan set over medium heat. Stir occasionally until toasted, you should be able to start smelling them slightly. Should take about 3 minutes.
I prefer the frying pan method as it's faster and I can keep a close eye on it. But you really do need to stand by the pan. Don't go walking off to do something else unless you want burnt oats.
Once the oats are toasted and cool enough to handle, put them in the food processor until they are chopped fine and look like flour.
Making the oat flour yourself is so much cheaper than buying already made oat flour.
🍪 Making the Dough
Here is how to put the dough together and bake the cookies.
- In the bowl of your stand mixer add the butter and sugar. Beat until well combined and lighter in color, around 3 minutes.
- Scrap the side of the bowl. Then mix in the egg and vanilla extract until combined.
- Add the flour mixture and combine on slow. You don't want flour going everywhere!
- Remove the bowl. Stir in the remaining whole oats you toasted along with the chocolate chips with a spatula.
I recommend using a disher to form the cookies. It makes your life so much easier. Alton recommends using an 1 ½ inch disher, mine is more like 2 inches. So I ended up with less, but bigger cookies. That's fine by me.
💡 Top Cookie Tip - If you think your cookies are spreading too thin for your liking, you can chill the dough for at least a half hour before baking. This will harden the butter and the cookies won't spread as much. I highly recommend not skipping this step, especially if you want a more chewy cookie. Your patience will be rewarded.
❕ Why This Recipe Works
We don't need the gluten that comes from wheat to make a cookie. We aren't baking a loaf of bread here. The butter is more than capable of keeping everything together.
🆓 Are They Gluten Free?
It depends on the oats you use. If you have someone who is really sensitive to gluten, then you will want to make sure that your oats are labeled as being certified gluten free. Often times oats are processed on shared equipment with wheat products, so cross contamination is a real possibility and can be dangerous to someone who is gluten intolerant. Read the packaging!
♻️ Substitutions
You can buy oat flour if you are unable to make it yourself. Or you could try my favorite gluten free flour. It contains oats and teff flour, and make great cookies as well - I used it for these gluten free sugar cookies.
If you don't want to do chocolate chips, you can stick to the traditional raisins or try these dried fruits:
- Dried cherries
- Dried blueberries
- Dried cranberries
For more fun, mix and match these different dried fruits.
You could also try dried pears, strawberries, apricots, or peaches. You would need to chop those up before adding to the dough.
🎄 Christmas Version
These cookies are great to make at Christmas time with your favorite Christmas chocolate. Here is what I like:
These are Nestle Tollhouse Peppermint Filled Truffles. Little bite sized truffles baked with a delicious peppermint filling. I actually had them in cookies last year in lieu of a cake for my December birthday! You can find them in the month of December in many stores that carry Nestle chips. I got these ones at Kroger.
If mint and oat sounds like a weird combo to you, just trust me on this one and give it a try. They also have Winter Dark Chocolate and Mint morsels, which I use in these cookies.
🍴 Other Alton Brown Recipes To Try
The Oatiest Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- 16 ounces old-fashioned rolled oats
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- pinch kosher salt
- 10 ounces butter
- 6 ounces dark brown sugar
- 3 ½ ounces pure cane sugar
- 1 large egg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 8 ounces chocolate chips
Instructions
- Toast the oats in a frying pan set over medium heat.
- Stir occasionally until toasted, you should be able to start smelling them slightly.
- Should take about 3 minutes. Allow to cool enough so you could handle them.
- Add 8 ounces of the oats to your food processor. Process them until they are the consistency of flour.
- To the food processor bowl add the cinnamon, baking powder, and salt. Pulse a few times to combine.
- In the bowl of your stand mixer add the butter and sugar. Beat until well combined and lighter in color, around 3 minutes.
- Scrap the side of the bowl. Then mix in the egg and vanilla extract until combined.
- Add the ffour mixture and combine on slow so the flour doesn't go everywhere.
- Remove the bowl. Stir in the remaining whole oats you toasted along with the chocolate chips.
- Using a 2-inch disher, scoop the cookie dough out and onto a parchment lined half sheet pan. Make sure to a leave a couple inches between cookies. Don't overcrowd the pan.
- Bake the cookies for 12 to 15 minutes or until they are beginning to brown around the edges. I recommend rotating the pan(s) halfway through the bake time so even baking.
Notes
- Spread the oats onto a half sheet pan. Bake until the oats start to smell and are lightly toasted. No more than 20 minutes. Keep a careful eye on them.
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