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Monday, October 27, 2008

salted oatmeal cookies

Sometimes all you want is a damn oatmeal cookie.

Can you spy other interesting objects in this photo?*


Oatmeal cookies often suffer from carrot cake syndrome - they have so many add-ins including but not limited to raisins, chocolate, a whole spice ship, etc. you might as well be eating trail mix.

Enter the salted oatmeal cookie. This is a barebones recipe with just a touch of nutmeg to bring the flavors together, and coarse salted sprinkled over the top. They have a really nice butterscotchy flavor to them despite the scant amount of brown sugar (butterscotch = butter + brown sugar). I made these for a Saturday night homework party (yes, I am cool), and studying has rarely been better. Salty-sweet for the win!

Added bonus feature: oatmeal content makes them suitable for breakfast.

This is a crunchy cookie recipe. If you like your cookies slightly pliable when cool, take them out of the oven after 12 minutes. They'll look pale and undone, but that's because the dough has less egg and brown sugar than your standard cookie recipe. If you enjoy wearing your cookie, bake up to 16 minutes. Adulterate your dough with a handful of chocolate chunks if you please.

If you like soft and chewy cookies, I might experiment with using 2 eggs and/or more brown sugar and less granulated sugar.


Studiously Salted Oatmeal Cookies

1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

14 tablespoons (1 3/4 sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups rolled oats (oatmeal)
coarse salt for sprinkling (kosher or sea salt is nice)

Heat oven to 350F.
In a bowl, mix first 5 ingredients together.
In a larger bowl, beat butter and sugars together until fluffy. Add egg and vanilla. Mix till combined. Gradually add flour mixture and mix until flour is just incorporated.
Gradually add in oats till mixed.

Make ping-pong sized balls of dough and put them on a cookie sheet. Gently flatten the tops of the balls a little with your fingers. Barely sprinkle salt over the tops. It only takes a little!

Bake 12-16 minutes - 12 if you want a softer cookie, longer if you want a crispier one. Cookies will look pale.


*leopard ears, bear ears, bike light

4 comments:

Jenn said...

Do I need to change my recipe formatting to make them more readable?

Unknown said...

Are you intending to just be informative or be usable?

I write to create a recipe archive for myself, so I find it helpful to type them out as I would follow it.

Jenn said...

I do the same, and I try to be concise, but it can be hard to follow under that format. Thoughts? I would like it to be usable...

Unknown said...

I do enjoy the brevity of your posts, and people that know how to cook should have no problem following them. Who do you hope will use them? Keep content as is, but break down steps into multiple paragraphs for increased readability/utility?