It is a truth universally acknowledged that peanut butter is a quintessentially American food. Isn’t it amazing how those “universal truths” are often utterly wrong? The Aztecs were actually the first to mess about with peanut-mashing, creating a paste that was a proto-peanut butter. Of course, George Washington Carver, an early food scientist, came up with three hundred uses for the humble legume between 1891 and 1927. In 1884 Marcellus Gilmore Edson – a Canadian – patented a peanut paste made from dry roasted peanuts. His work overlaps with the work of John Harvey Kellogg, whose 1895 pureé from raw peanuts was touted as a protein substitute for those without teeth (eek). In 1903 the first grinder for the specific use of grinding peanuts into peanut butter was patented, and the first recorded recipe for peanut butter cookies was in 1916. So far, not specifically American at all. Interestingly enough, the first time the traditional hash-marks appeared on top of the cookies was in a Pillsbury cookbook in 1936.. No explanation was given, so bakers assume it was to flatten them to allow them more thoroughly; others point out that it allowed allergy-sufferers to identify the peanut butter ingredient. (Nerdy “The More You Know!” history lesson sourced via About.com, TIME magazine’s brief history of peanut butter, and The National Peanut Board.)
According to the statistics people, America is the third largest peanut producer worldwide (hi Texas and Georgia!) and Americans eat around 700 million pounds of peanut butter per year (about 3 pounds per person). While we know that no one who reads this blog is by any means average, that does speak to a people who love their peanut butter – and their peanut butter cookies.
Typically, until recently, T. absolutely hated them.
The biggest complaint most people have about peanut butter cookies is that they’re not a low calorie food. T’s complaint? That peanut butter cookies are usually massively, ridiculously too-too-too sweet. D. posits that the sweeter the better, but T. insists that peanut butter cookies are supposed to taste of peanuts, not sugar. The argument came to its usual standstill when T. whipped up a batch of pbj cookies with… almond flour. Just to throw things off completely.
Almondy PB&C’s
Prep a cookie sheet, we used greaseproof paper. REHEAT your oven, 350F°/170°C
- 2 C blanched almond flour
- 1/2 C. natural peanut butter, in this case, crunchy
- 1/4 C. Truvia or 2/4 C. agave
- 1/4 Tbsp. vanilla extract
- 2 tsp. baking powder
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 large egg or 1/4 C. ground flax, plus 3 Tbsp. water for egg replacement
Peanut butter cookies are simple enough to bring together – cream together your salt, sugar, your fats and your egg, at the last, add the flour and prepare for something ridiculously sticky. It took less than half an hour to roll the dough into simple balls. D. suggested that, since he didn’t want not-very-sweet peanut butter cookies that chocolate might as well be involved, since he doesn’t really like it. Lindt 85% was made into a quick ganache and used in place of the traditional jam thumbprint. Honestly, that was a mistake. Actually, there were a few mistakes:
- We forgot to spray PAM on the greaseproof paper. Yes. It’s greaseproof, but the cookies will still stick slightly if they’re not entirely cooled
- We forgot to let the cookies entirely cool. ANYTHING made with almond flour MUST be allowed to cool quite a bit; it’s tender and delicate
- We should have used a Silpat or something like it. It’s easy to get very brown bottoms to your foods when using sugar subs; Silpat helps it cook easily, cool quickly, and look better
- We should have mixed sugars. Truvia is already made up of stevia and erythritol; in our quest to avoid weird aftertastes or the “cleansing” side effect of using many sugar alcohols, we’ve avoided Splenda. A tiny bit of Splenda? Is workable. A couple of tablespoons might have been helpful here, as it seemed to D. like the cookies got less sweet as time went on, and the peanut butter flavor took over.
What We Did Wrong
What We Did Right:
- We tried.
The list on the positives here might seem pretty short — it’s not. The attempt is A Big Deal. A lot of people, when faced with a necessary change in a diet, just… can’t. New, weird ingredients with strange names and unpredictable outcomes are really enough to make a person discouraged. It’s easier, in many ways, to retreat to “okay” foods, and try to stick with old favorites, than venture out into something new. Food blogger friends have urged us to get back in the game, but we’ve kind of become the worst kinds of food bloggers, the kinds who don’t blog about food. It’s because, to be blunt, there are a LOT of mistakes in the kitchen these days. Tons. We dump out baked items, bowls of batter, and we kind of hate ourselves just a little each time for the waste. But, waste and flops is how we fuel creation.
The verdict is that this is one tender, tasty and delicious piece of cookie. The chocolate was weird – it lost its temper and became really oddly crumbly – but with a dollop of low sugar Smucker’s, these will be a completely yummy compliment to a mug of Assam tea, or even a glass of milk. The almond flour makes these cookies more tender than the traditional peanut butter cookie, and they don’t have the sandy/shortbready feel of some recipes. (Have you ever had a gritty peanut butter cookie? T. has. It bewildered her.) T. feels this tenderness is an improvement. D. remains ambivalent.
As the days continue to cool and baked goods seem like a better and better idea (along with turning on the furnace – which we’re delaying until October, if we can), we’re going to keep messing with these recipes, working to see what we can do with them, and continue to try and perfect the tender, spongy scone – with just a tiny bit of fresh cranberry and orange zing (that was a success!), fine-tune our carrot cake muffins (still needs work) and present you with some new things to try – mainly because of sheer cussed stubbornness, but also because we love to tinker, and we’ve never met a recipe we couldn’t make better. (Or, our version of better, anyway.)
Cheers, and happy autumn!
I’m happy to review the cookies in person tomorrow if there are any left. Just sayin’.
Sadly, the review samples of the cookies met with, uh, some difficulties during transportation… and were utterly lost to T’s digestive system.
Further research is ongoing, of course.
What vile peanut butter cookies have you been eating? The reason they’re SO delicious is that they are usually less sweet than other genres.
And truly~crunchy p-nut butter is the only choice.
Okay, huh. The peanut butter cookies I eat are usually homemade, and always vilely sweet.
I need to come live in your gastronomical paradise.
I’ve had an awful time using any sugar replacement as directed. Splenda and Truvia, even the Stevia drops all taste chemically to me. I’ve had an okay experience with brown sugar Splenda, but read closely, it’s half sugar! My newest strategy, and I bet T would do well with this, is to use a sugar substitute but not in equivalent amounts. The more low-sugar you eat, the less sweet you want things to be anyway, so when a recipe say 1.5 cups Splenda (looking at you, Peter Reinhart) I might use 1/2 cup. The chemical taste doesn’t overwhelm me, and it’s just lightly sweet. These days, that seems to be enough for my body.
Or I just make low-carb baked goods that don’t need sugar and compensate by what i put on them – scones, pancakes, etc. Quite a challenge though, and I always learn a lot from your experiments too!
Jen – YES, to the brown sugar Splenda! It works beautifully, just like regular sugar… because … it …is. ::sigh::
I’m now running scared from any recipe by Peter Reinhart. A cup and a half of plain sugar would have raised my brows, but chemical sugar in that amount?! Seriously?!
I, too, am noticing that I can deal with so much less sweetener in anything at all, so that makes me happy. Thanks for the suggestion – I’m going to be fiddling with the chocolate+
prunes, er, dried plums idea, plus a few others, and continuing to mess about with sweeteners, so stay tuned!