These Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies are incredibly simple to make with only 6 ingredients, and no flour or butter required! But don’t be fooled by their simplicity- this flourless peanut butter cookie recipe is a major contender for your favorite cookie recipe yet- they turn out with lightly crisp edges and soft centers. You may want to double this family favorite!
PrintEasy (Flourless!) Peanut Butter Cookies
Description
The EASIEST peanut butter cookie recipe turns out soft and flavorful. Chocolate chips, optional!
Ingredients
1 cup peanut butter (we recommend standard Jiff or Skippy, not natural style pb)
3/4 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1 large or extra large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon table salt
optional: heaping 1/2 cup chopped chocolate or chocolate chips
(I recommend dark or semi-sweet)
optional: 1/3 cup oats
optional: sugar for rolling
Instructions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Beat peanut butter and brown sugar until smooth. Add egg, vanilla, baking soda, and salt. Mix for about a minute. Shape into balls, and if desired roll in sugar. Flatten with a criss cross pattern with a fork, or simply flatten with the bottom of a glass. If you’d like to add Oatmeal Chocolate Chip PB Cookies, add chocolate chips and oats. Bake for 8-9 minutes, don’t over-bake, and let them sit on the baking sheet for a few minutes before transferring to a cooling rack. Makes 18-20 cookies.
These flourless peanut butter cookies are seriously the easiest, quickest cookies and I almost didn’t want to tell you guys that they were gluten free, or didn’t have any butter or flour, because I know there are people out there who will dismiss this recipe thinking of it simply as a replacement if you can’t have normal cookies. Not the case. This is actually just an amazing cookie recipe and it’s simply a fun side note that they don’t have flour or butter. As proof- I honestly make these more often than any other peanut butter cookie recipe. It’s a bonus that they’re stinking fast. It literally takes me maybe 60 seconds to mix the dough. This is one of our family favorites for our weekly Monday Night Family Nights because I always have the ingredients on hand!
Ingredients for flourless peanut butter cookies
Here we go! This is all you need, really.
Mix your dough
When your ingredients first come together, the dough is very smooth and loose. It doesn’t look thick enough to be cookie dough.
The key is to keep mixing! It will quickly come together and magically change texture- this time into kind of a crumbly texture. NOTE: The texture of this dough is different than standard cookie dough, almost oily? It feels funny but it works. Just go with it.
Optional: Add Chocolate Chips and/or oats
If you’d like to add chocolate chips, which are optional, you’d do that at this point. Again, the texture of this dough is different- the chocolate chips won’t “stick” in there as well. Just do your best to mix them in. You can also add oats in there, too!
I like to roll balls in sugar and give them a little criss cross, but you could simply put spoonfuls of dough on the sheet and flatten them a little with a bottom of a cup if you’re in a hurry.
If I add chocolate chips, I usually skip the step with rolling in sugar and criss-crossing and instead I just use a cookie scoop and then lightly flatten the dough balls with my hand or the bottom of a cup.
Bake your cookies
You want to bake them just until the edges are set, and not over bake. In my oven 8 minutes is just about perfect.
Let them cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes so they don’t fall apart on you when you transfer them, and then put them on a cooling rack.
If you put them in an airtight container, they’re great the next day, too.
And I love that the basic recipe makes a small batch, about 18 cookies with a standard size scoop. You can easily double it if you want more.
Speaking of super-easy cookie recipes, if this one sounds good, you’ll probably also love this Nutella Cookie recipe- with only FOUR ingredients!
Hello,
These cookies sound delicious!! Can you make them with organic palm sugar instead of brown sugar?
Sincerely,
Kim Rosch
You can certainly try!
These cookies are our absolute favorites at my house! My husband and myself always make these every Sunday to have throughout the week as snacks! I Lovveeeee how minimalistic they are and I even cut back the brown sugar to 1/2cup and they still are just as fabulous. I was wondering though, has anyone tried to make these cookies with powdered peanut butter in order to cut the fat? I have just recently purchased powder PB for the first time and am excited to give it a whirl! ???
I don’t think that will work because you would then have close to zero fat in the recipe. But you can certainly try it!
Saw these this morning and made them immediately! I wanted to make the carmelitas, but that needed a run to the store, but this was on hand. 😉 Mostly, as I was out of brown sugar *gasp*, so I subbed white sugar with molasses, and all we had was Skippy whipped PB. It worked wonderfully! I used the leftover ‘brown sugar’ to roll the dough balls in. They were flat, but it was my own fault as I waited a minute too long to take them out…right before I did they were plump. Still soft, still tasty.
Has anyone tried to make these ahead of time and freeze them? Are they still ok after thawing? I need to bake these a week before a birthday do to a crazy busy week. Whenever I’ve made them prior, they’re eaten gone before I can even consider freezing! Lol!
I’ve never frozen them, but generally speaking, cookies freeze great!
They are actually really great to put in the freezer for keeping! We often times will store ours in the freezer after baking and it makes them a nice cool treat. They do not become hard in the freezer and will thaw relatively fast (within 30min).
Thanks for the recipe. I made them for our Easter Fayre and they were very well received by all brave enough to try them. The gluten free sticker I put on them was a little scary for some but all were surprised how delicious they were and very impressed that I made a cookie without flour and butter. I mixed 1/2 cup creamy with 1/2 cup crunchy and they turned out wonderful.
TO FIX THE FLAT, Try switching out your baking soda for baking powder. Baking Soda requires an acid to even work. So it’s probably just the water in your egg white, through steam that is helping the rise in your recipe. The Chocolate is an acid and would help but it’s in chunks so maybe not in this case.
If you add a little baking powder then your baking soda would work, if it is double acting powder. 4 to 1, powder to soda.
Could I put the link to this recipe on blog?
If you would like to see it,here’s my blog link https://mylittlesisterbakes.wordpress.com/
~Genna
Thanks for the beautiful fotos and information. These cookies look amazing, but I find your tone to be a bit disrespectful to people who have a gluten sensitivity. Work on that.
seriously..it’s people like you who make people like me not even want to attempt to work with the public. There’s a crabass in EVERY crowd! Quit picking and be Thankful she took the time to post this recipe at all…and leave it at that!
Followed recipe exactly, but they came out flat, like pancakes. Disappointing.
hi,
I used the recipe to make my cookies yesterday but it turned out to be a disaster. The batter was so oily, when I was rolling it into balls it kept slipping. When I put it on my baking sheet, you could tell it was very oily. I put it in the oven for 10 mins and when I tried to take it out, it looked like it hadn’t even baked. I landed up baking it extra only to have a burnt batch. It was super disappointing 🙁
Someone please do help me correct my mistakes.
Do you think I could substitute 1 cup of honey for the brown sugar or would that be a total disaster?
I am admittedly NOT a baker, but wanted to try these when my inlaws are in town… Can I make the dough before and bake them a day or two later? Also, do I bake them on a greased sheet ( like sprayed w Pam)? Thanks for the advice!!!
This is the second recipe I tried, the first one didn’t use baking soda, brown sugar or salt, everything else was the same. First of all if you over beat the mixture it’ll get really crumbly and it will separate from the oil. How do I know?… well that’s what I did 🙁 the first time (1st recipe also), the only solution I could think at the moment was to let the mixture rest and seep all the oil and when I started to form the cookies I used a napkin to pat them dry, I didn’t want to waste the ingredients. Baked them for 12 minutes. They tasted like candy more than pb cookies, they were flat and chewy. Not what I was looking for. So I gave this no-flour cookie another try but this time I followed this recipe (using 1/2 C brown sugar because my pb has sugar in it, if you want to know I used Skippy Creamy Pb). I mixed these until the ingredients were barely incorporated. Baked them for 10 minutes and let them cool (until I could touch the pan I would say 7-8 mins). I let them cool in the cookie rack a for 5 minutes more, and OH MY GOSH when we tasted them they were really, really delicious. Soft and with the pb taste that I was looking for. I’m sorry this took so many words to explain, but I thought I could give you my 2 cents. Hope this help! Thanks for the recipe 😉
A similar recipe to this was always on the side of the peanut butter jar growing up and it’s how I’ve always made peanut butter cookies! One of my first things I baked all by myself! Now my 4 year old makes them!
Made these last night and won’t make again. As others have said, they’re very flat. Plus, mine are so soft they barely hold together when you pick them up.
Seriously delicious and super peanut-flavored with nothing to hide behind.
I had to make these cookies just to see if that was possible without flour. Made them,and can”t believe how Great they taste.I can’t thank you enough for this recipe. I am not allergic to gluten and will make these quite often.Marvelous tasting cookies. I thank every one for there honest Reviews.
Oh ho, ho!
I used natural peanut butter, cooked for 9 minutes and they came out crumbly and fell apart completely when I picked one up (fully cooled). Maybe it was the natural PB? Just thought I’d let others know. I love all things OBB 🙂
Ya, I’d skip the natural and stick with good ol’ Skippy or Jif 🙂
Made these exactly as directed and they were awesome. Which is a big thing coming from someone who doesn’t even like peanut butter in general. With the standard cookie scoop I got 17 cookies and baked them 8 minutes. I used CREAMY SKIPPY pb, a new jar. I know sometimes old pb that has been sitting in the pantry for a few months gets kind of loose and oily sometimes so I wonder if that is an issue some people have had? In any case, these worked perfectly for me.
These are delicious! I just tried them 😀 Thank you
These are awesome! I’m currently not eating any soy or milk products and have been craving sweets. These cookies hit the spot.
Just made a batch of these and they’re a winner! My family loves PB cookies and this recipe is going to be the one I reach for first from now on. Thanks so much for sharing it!
These cookies were so good! They really did melt in my mouth. I was a little skeptical since there was no flour, and the only negative was that they were a little thin, but other than that they were perfect! I bet you could substitute applesauce or banana puree for the egg to make this a vegan recipe.
Th
I’m just so disappointed that you’ve started truncating recipes in your feed. I won’t be reading (or sharing) as often. I follow a lot of food blogs and tend to read quickly; having to click through slows me down too much. I usually end up removing feeds that truncate their posts, but I’ll be sad to delete this one.
We know it’s a pain and we hate to have to do it. But. Every single time we DON’T truncate the feed, we get an email within hours of posting that another site has scraped the entire recipe and posted it on their own blog. These scraper sites are there to steal content and generate income, they rarely have a person to contact, and the only way to get them removed is to file a form. It takes several weeks of investigation on the part of the web host, and if we have to file a paper report, it takes at least an hour of our time to file it. For every recipe. So I know it’s a pain, but we’re doing it to protect our work and so we can spend more of our time making yummy food and less of it doing pain-in-the-butt behind the scenes busywork.
I made these tonight and they were fantastic. I had some all natural peanut butter that I wanted to finish off but only had 3/4 cup so I added another quarter cup of traditional Jif peanut butter. I also only had dark brown sugar on hand. I rolled mine a bit bigger – about 3″ in and baked them a bit longer (about 12-13 min) and got 10. These were a hit for us. Perfect warm from the oven with a glass of cold milk. This is will be a great option for a quick homemade weeknight dessert. Thanks so much for sharing.
Sara,
I had the same problem as a few other people too. Flat and extremely oily. They tasted good but the oily-ness was kinda throwing me off. I used chunky peanut butter and mixed it in the Bosch mixer. Should I have used creamy and mixed it with a hand mixer instead? Would you make them again and show a picture of what the dough should look like after it has been mixed? Any help would be great! Thanks for the new recipe.
Wow! These are the best peanut butter cookies I have ever had! Thank you for the wonderful recipe.
I just made these for my sister’s birthday, and they are amazing!! Thanks ladies.