Alton Brown's Oatiest Oatmeal Cookies Ever

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. 

? 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.

♻️ 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.

? Other Alton Brown Recipes To Try

• Chocolate Pudding
• Chocapocalypse Cookies
• Bonuts - Biscuit Donuts
• Blueberry Buckle