Throughout my entire childhood, my mom worked part-time, which meant that she left us at home during the summers from 7 am until 2 pm. Mom hired a baby-sitter while we were still in grade school, but once I reached middle school, she trusted us to stay by ourselves.
My younger brother and I knew how to serve ourselves breakfast—shake out the cereal box and pour in the milk—but Mom always stocked the fridge with our favorite lunch items of yogurt, bread, cheese, and lots of fruit. However, the jar of peanut butter called my name fairly loudly every once in a while, so I’d wander into the pantry and grab that instead.
On those days, lunch consisted of two things: peanut butter and crackers. I’d dip one buttery cracker into the jar at a time, scraping up at least a teaspoon of peanut butter every time. With 10-15 crackers for lunch, that really added up… And Mom had to buy a fresh jar nearly every other week!
But besides crackers, sandwiches, and toast, we didn’t really eat peanut butter any other way, including desserts. (I always preferred my cookies with lots of chocolate!) But after seeing one too many peanut butter treats on Pinterest, I decided that might need to change and set out to make these…
The Ultimate Healthy Soft & Chewy Peanut Butter Cookies! They’re soft, chewy, and have a prominent nutty peanut butter flavor, but not too much to make you feel bogged down and sluggish. With the irresistible balance of sweet and salty, these won’t last long at all in your cookie jar!
To help you understand what makes these the ultimate healthy peanut butter cookies, let’s talk a little baking science. (Or feel free to skip this section and head straight to the recipe!)
First off, the dry ingredients. I chose white whole wheat flour because it gives you the benefits of fiber and extra nutrients like with regular whole wheat flour, but it has a lighter, less wheat-y taste. Then you’ll need baking powder for rise and just a hint of salt. Most peanut butters already come salted, so adjust the amounts to suit your tastes.
The rest of the ingredients proved to be a bit trickier, so let’s move on to sugar. I started out by trying honey, but that added too much moisture to the cookie dough. The cookies spread as flat as pancakes, even with over 3 hours of chilling, and they tasted like muffins—not cookies!
I switched to brown sugar and coconut sugar next because they’re both solid sugars, so they didn’t add the same moisture. Both of these options taste exactly the same (no tropical coconut taste, I promise!), but they look a little different. The coconut sugar cookies are darker and look speckled because the coconut sugar doesn’t dissolve quite as well. But that doesn’t affect their taste or texture!
Note: Coconut sugar is clean eating friendly, while brown sugar is not.
And now for the most important part… The peanut butter! I tried making these cookies with 8, 9, and 10 tablespoons. The first batch didn’t have quite enough peanut butter flavor—just a little too faint for my tastes—but the batch with 10 tablespoons turned out a little greasier than I wanted. So to quote Goldilocks, 9 tablespoons was “just right!”
I originally tried using pure peanut butter and an egg as the fat sources, but those cookies failed the spread, even without chilling. To increase the spread, I omitted the egg yolk and added in a tiny bit of butter because butter melts when heated. The resulting cookies spread a tiny bit (think a few millimeters), so you’ll still need to flatten the cookie dough to the thickness and width that you want.
My secret to soft and chewy cookies? Slightly underbake them (not a second more than is called for in the recipe!), and leave them on the warm pan to cool for longer. This allows the centers to continue cooking all the way through without the outsides turning crisp and crunchy. The cookies will stay soft and chewy for an entire week—if they last that long!
So grab a glass of milk, your favorite jar of peanut butter, and start baking! And when you make your own, remember to snap a picture and share it on Instagram using #amyshealthybaking and tagging @amyshealthybaking IN the photo itself! (That guarantees I’ll see your picture! ?) I’d love to see your cookies and feature them in my Sunday Spotlight series!
| The Ultimate Healthy Soft & Chewy Peanut Butter Cookies | | Print |
- 2 cups (240g) white whole wheat or gluten-free* flour (measured like this)
- 1 ½ tsp (4g) baking powder
- ¼ tsp (2g) salt
- 1 tbsp (14g) unsalted butter or coconut oil, melted and cooled slightly
- 2 large egg whites, room temperature
- 2 tsp (10mL) vanilla extract
- 9 tbsp (144g) homemade creamy peanut butter
- 1 cup (192g) coconut sugar or brown sugar
- Preheat the oven to 350°F, and line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together the butter, egg whites, and vanilla. Stir in the peanut butter until completely incorporated. Stir in the sugar. Add in the flour mixture, stirring just until incorporated.
- Roll the dough into 24 balls, and place onto the prepared baking sheets. Flatten to the desired thickness and width. Bake at 350°F for 9-11 minutes. Cool on the baking sheets for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.
Whole wheat pastry flour, regular whole wheat flour, and all-purpose flour may be substituted for the white whole wheat flour.
I highly recommend using my easy homemade creamy peanut butter recipe. (It only takes 5 minutes to make!) This recipe works best with natural-style peanut butter made with just peanuts and salt. It will also work with Skippy Natural creamy peanut butter. Do not use crunchy peanut butter; the cookies won't turn out.
Coconut sugar is clean eating friendly, while brown sugar is not.
The cookies barely spread at all during baking, so flatten them to the desired thickness and width before placing the baking sheets in the oven.
The cookie dough should look crumbly when you first mix it up, but as long as you can roll it into balls without the balls falling apart, it's the right consistency! If your cookie dough is too dry to roll into balls, add milk one tablespoon at a time until the cookie dough holds together.
{gluten-free, clean eating, low fat}
View Nutrition Information + Weight Watchers Points
Me thinks the recipe needs to be modified – there’s way too much flour for the wet ingredients you use. Next time I’m doing 1 cup – had the same issue: crumbly dry cookies.
I made this recipe and unfortunately they were so crumbly they could barely stay together! Added additional butter and another tbsp peanut butter and I could smash them so they held together. Unfortunately couldn’t get them very flat. They turned out dry and dense. I followed the recipe to a T so not sure what happened :/
I’m sorry the cookies didn’t turn out for you Kristin; that must have been disappointing. There are three main possibilities for what caused the issues that you saw: too much flour in the cookie dough (did you measure it with a kitchen scale or as directed in the link in the Ingredients section?), not enough sugar, or the brand of peanut butter that you used. Certain types of creamy peanut butter are thicker than others and don’t absorb the other ingredients as well. What brand did you use?
Hi. I made these cookies with ingredients listed, except I used organic whole wheat flour and crunchy ORGANIC No-stir peanut butter. Yes, they did come out somewhat dry when I smooshed them down into cookies around the edges, but I just gently used my finger to smooth all the crumbs back in around the edges. While there were crumbs at the end of the process of taking them out of the oven, they seemed to only equal crumbs of about one fourth of a cookie. The cookies came out perfect and were much smoother, yet with slight cracks all over the top, if that makes sense.. I used the coconut sugar but it didn’t look “rough” textured like your photos with the coconut sugar did. I ended up being able to roll out 18 cookies. I am watching my weight, on a diet counting calories and I really appreciate finding a healthy cookie that has just enough sweetness in it that I feel satisfied with one or two. Because I added the whole wheat flour instead of the white whole wheat flour I wondered if the caloric difference was significant. Thanks for these. Next I will try your chocolate muffins! <3
The nutrition information should remain the same whether you use white whole wheat flour or regular whole wheat flour! 🙂 The crunchy peanut butter was probably the reason why the cookie dough was somewhat dry. With crunchy peanut butter, there isn’t as much of the “creamy” part of the peanut butter (because the peanut pieces take up space in the measuring cup), which is what holds the cookies together. Does that make sense? I’m so glad you enjoyed the cookies’ flavor, and I can’t wait to hear what you think of the chocolate muffins Kim!
I can’t wait to try these and will post my review when I do. In the meantime, I couldn’t help but notice that people are referring to dry, crumbly cookies and one poster mentioned Kroger brand whole wheat flour. I have never seen white whole wheat flour in the Kroger brand. I wonder if these posters are using regular whole wheat and not white whole wheat like the recipe calls for. Regular whole wheat seems to soak up the liquid of a recipe a lot more to produce a drier product than things made with white whole wheat. Just a thought…
Thanks for sharing your insights Jennifer — I really appreciate it! 🙂 I’m excited to hear what you think of the cookies!
Hi Amy,
Loved the peanut butter cookies. Wanted to ask you if I could substitute coconut sugar with honey?? cannot wait to try out more recipes .. xoxo Jo
I’m so glad you enjoyed the cookies Jo! 🙂 I do not recommend substituting honey for the coconut sugar in this recipe. The honey will make the cookie dough much too wet, closer to the consistency of muffin batter, and the cookies wouldn’t bake correctly.
I made these cookies today, and I tried using natural peanut butter. I just wanted to let you know that using natural peanut butter does not work. I used Trader Joe’s unsalted creamy peanut butter, I weighed the flour, and the cookie dough was very dry and crumbly. I tried adding an additional 3 tablespoons of melted butter and 2 tablespoons of peanut oil, but the cookies were still dry. In the end, I gave up on making healthy cookies, and I added an extra egg, an extra 3 tablespoons of peanut butter, and a total 17 tablespoons of additional butter/oil to get soft and chewy peanut butter cookies.
Oh goodness Elaine, that sounds frustrating! I’ve actually used natural peanut butter in this recipe with perfect results, so I’m not entirely sure what went wrong. It seems really strange that you had to add over 1 full cup of oil and melted butter to get the dough to come together. Did you add the correct amounts of both the flour and coconut sugar? Or did you substitute different types of either of those ingredients?
Thanks for the reply! I measured the flour using a scale, and I used white sugar instead of coconut sugar. I think it was just the brand of natural peanut butter.
My pleasure Elaine! I’ve made these cookies with my easy blender peanut butter, and it works. Maybe that’s worth trying for next time! 🙂
These look so yummy I just went to the store to get the ingredients. Can’t wait to give them a try. Thanks for the recipe.
I just finished making this recipe. The first batch didn’t go so well because I didn’t read the entire recipe about adding a little milk if it were dry. Second time I got it right and they are delicious!! Nice to have a guilt free treat. Thanks again for the recipe.
I’m so glad the cookies turned out for you!! 🙂
They look SO good. I’ve been wanting to make them for a little while now, and I finally got to do it today. I had the same issue that many people were having though, the dough was super crumbly. It looked like I didn’t even add in any wet ingredients. I know I measured everything correctly, so I’m not sure what the issue was. I’ve baked a few things with peanut butter before and I found that the dry ingredients to peanut butter (plus other wet ingredients, but I only said PB because that’s the main wet ingredient) ratio has to be somewhat close to 1:1, probably closer to 1:2. In this recipe, it was more or less 3 cups of dry ingredients against only a little over 1/2 cup of PB/wet ingredients. I ended up adding another 3/4 cup of PB and 1/2 cup of almond milk to get the dough to be a normal wet dough consistency. After that they weren’t bad, but they could’ve used more PB probably. I’m glad to see that this recipe has been such a success for you though!
Yikes! That isn’t normal for this recipe. I’d like to work together to figure out what happened Becca! 🙂 What brand of creamy peanut butter did you use, and did you make any substitutions for any other ingredients? Both of those will impact the texture of the cookie dough.
I just made these using Skippy Natural peanut butter and all purpose flour (it’s all we had), and the final mix was super dry – it looked more like clumpy breadcrumb mixture, or dry thanksgiving stuffing. I added 3-4 teaspoons of milk to get it closer to the right texture. I may have rolled them too thick — I made 12 instead of 24 — but the finished product came out more like scones than cookies.
Also, I did weigh out the flour — 238.9g — so I think that must just be too much flour for the wet ingredients? Maybe I should’ve added more milk, or more butter.
Thanks for sharing your feedback and information about measuring Harrison. Not all flours are ground equally, especially when it comes to all-purpose flour, so the brand most likely influenced the dry texture. What brand did you use? Also, the cookies must be thin and flattened before baking in order to taste chewy. If they’re too thick, like yours were, they’ll taste cakey or bready. If the dough is too sticky to flatten with your hands, use a spatula instead. 🙂