The best Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies are soft, chewy, healthy and of course, easy! These hearty low sugar oatmeal cookies are flourless and gluten-free with the perfect chewy texture! Enjoy with Dark Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies or Pumpkin Cookies with Cream Cheese Frosting.
With the exception of Candy Cane Cookies at Christmas and Pumpkin Cookies in the fall, we don’t bake cookies in our house very often.
The two main reasons being: sugar and gluten.
Rolled oats are my saving grace this season. Thanks to this great peanut butter oatmeal cookie recipe, we can enjoy a healthy treat that is gluten-free AND very low in sugar!
Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies
These cookies are everything a peanut butter cookie should be:
- Rich peanut butter flavor
- Soft and chewy
- Slightly sandy (thanks to the peanut butter) but without crumbling in your hands
- SUPER easy to make
- Incredibly addicting
- Plus they’re naturally gluten free (be sure to use certified gluten free oats for gluten sensitivity)
In fact, my husband said that this is the best peanut butter oatmeal cookie recipe he’s ever had in his life, EVER!
Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies Ingredients
The ingredients you need are simple, everyday items you have in your pantry.
- Butter.
- Sugar. I used Turbinado sugar, but white sugar will work. I would not recommend brown sugar.
- Natural Peanut Butter. Creamy peanut butter is the way to go!
- Egg + Egg Yolk. The extra egg yolk is what gives our cookie some structure.
- Cornstarch. This trick is from Sally’s Baking Addiction. Adding cornstarch to cookies creates a softer dough and a more tender cookie.
- Oat Flour. We’re taking old fashioned oats and whizzing them in the blender to make homemade oat flour. Quick oats will work too if that’s what you have on hand.
How do you make peanut butter oatmeal cookies from scratch?
- Measure ½ cup sugar into a blender and blend to make powdered sugar.
- Pour into the bowl of a stand mixer, or a large bowl if you’re using a hand-held mixer. Add 2 sticks butter + ½ tsp salt + ⅔ cup peanut butter and mix until everything is super creamy.
- Add 1 egg + 1 egg yolk + 2 tsp vanilla into the bowl and combine.
- Measure 3 cups rolled oats into a blender and process. Scrape everything into the mixing bowl. Add 2 tsp cornstarch and mix. Chill in the refrigerator for 1 full hour. You cannot skip this step.
- Using a cookie scoop, measure 2 Tbsp of dough per cookie onto parchment or a Silpat mat. Leaving 2″ of space between cookies, fill up your cookie sheet with dough and make criss cross marks.
- Bake for 8-11 minutes, or until the edges of the cookies are JUST lightly browned. Let the cookies cool on the pan for 10 minutes. Gently remove to a cooling wire rack and allow the cookies to cool completely before storing.
Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookie Baking Tips
This batter isn’t like most cookie batters – it will seem crumbly and dry due to the peanut butter. But DON’T WORRY. Make this recipe exactly as written AND use the following tips. Then you’ll have the most amazing peanut butter oatmeal cookies in no time.
- Chill the dough. As tempting as it is, don’t skip this step by baking from room temperature. Chilling the dough helps the dough scoop evenly and prevents the cookie from spreading in the oven. Unless you want one big flat super crunchy cookie? I didn’t think so.
- Use a cookie scoop. I feel like a broken record with my cookie scoop. I use it for everything from our favorite chocolate chip cookies, to 15-minute Italian meatballs, to freezing yogurt. This is the one I have and I LOVE it. Using a cookie scoop really helps with the cookie shaping process. They’re all the same size, they bake evenly, and the kids don’t argue over who gets the bigger cookies.
- Use a Silpat mat. This handy thing makes clean up simple AND it helps the cookies bake evenly without getting too crispy too soon. This is the set I have and use ALL the time, including any time I have to knead bread dough. It helps to keep the counters clean!
- Use a wet fork to make a criss-cross. It’s SO much easier to make those cute fork marks using a wet fork versus a dry fork. You can mark about 4 cookies before needing to re-wet the fork, so you don’t have to worry about spending a ton of time going back and forth.
- Let the cookies cool. Peanut butter cookies tend to be crumbly, again, thanks to the peanut butter. I know it’s hard to not eat them straight out of the oven, but if you let them cool for at least 10 minutes on a cooling rack (this is the set I have), they won’t fall apart on you!
Can you freeze peanut butter oatmeal cookies?
Yes! My husband couldn’t stop eating these cookies and asked me to put the rest in the freezer so he wouldn’t ruin his dinner!
You can freeze peanut butter oatmeal cookies BEFORE you bake them, or after.
- If you freeze the raw cookie dough, I recommend portioning out the dough on a cookie sheet so that you can pull just as much dough as you need to make cookies that night. Otherwise, you’ll be chipping away at a massive block of cookie dough and you won’t get very far.
- If you freeze baked cookies, make sure you double wrap them so that they don’t get freezer burned and start to dry out on you. I recommend freezing in small freezer bags, and then again in gallon-size freezer bags. Remember that you can use plastic bags more than once to keep your waste down.
This recipe makes 30-35 cookies when you use two tablespoons of dough per cookie (that’s two small scoops).
You’ll have plenty to freeze if you make a single batch. If you are daring, a double batch will keep you stocked for quite some time!
My Favorite Cookie Recipes
- Healthier Sugar Cookies
- Dark Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies
- No-Bake Brownie Bites
- Healthier Candy Cane Cookies
- No-Bake Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Hummus
- Pumpkin Cookies with Cream Cheese Frosting
- No-Bake Apple Oatmeal Cookies
- Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
Watch How to Make Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies
Freezer Cooking: Breakfasts
Sign up to get instant access to my Freezer Cooking: Breakfasts Plan, complete with recipes, supply list, and shopping list!Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies
The best peanut butter oatmeal cookies are soft, chewy, healthy & of course, easy! These hearty low sugar oatmeal cookies are flourless and gluten-free with the perfect chewy texture!
- Prep Time: 1 hour 15 mins
- Cook Time: 8 mins
- Total Time: 1 hour 23 mins
- Yield: 30–35 1x
- Category: Dessert
- Method: Oven
- Cuisine: American
Ingredients
Instructions
- Measure ½ cup sugar into a blender and process for one minute, until the sugar looks like powdered sugar.
- Pour into the bowl of a stand mixer, or a large bowl if you’re using a hand-held mixer. (There’s no need to wash out the blender yet.) Add 2 sticks butter + ½ tsp salt + ⅔ cup peanut butter and mix until everything is super creamy.
- Add 1 egg + 1 egg yolk + 2 tsp vanilla and combine.
- Measure 3 cups rolled oats into a blender and process for one minute. Use a spatula to scrape everything into the mixing bowl.
- Add 2 tsp cornstarch and mix until you can no longer see dry portions of oat flour, about 2-4 minutes.
- Chill in the refrigerator for 1 full hour. You cannot skip this step.
- When the one hour is nearly up, preheat the oven to 350F and line your baking sheets with either parchment paper or a Silpat mat.
- Using a cookie scoop, measure 2 Tbsp of dough per cookie (this is 2 scoops for my cookie scoop).
- Leaving 2″ of space between cookies, fill up your cookie sheet with dough.
- Place remaining dough in the fridge if you are baking in batches.
- Use a wet fork to make the criss-cross pattern on the top of the cookies, if desired.
- Bake for 8-11 minutes, or until the edges of the cookies are JUST lightly browned.
- Remove from the oven and let the cookies cool on the pan for 10 minutes.
- Gently remove to a cooling wire rack and allow the cookies to cool completely before storing.
Repeat with the remaining cookie dough.
How many cookies does this recipe make?
Hello Wally,
This peanut butter oatmeal cookie recipe yields 30- 35 cookies.
They were yum! I just used regular sugar and they turned out fine. Also added a few chic chips at my sons request.
Thank you for sharing, Rebecca! Your variation sounds great!
This recipe is peanut butter cookie perfection! I followed Tiffany’s instructions to the letter and they are perfect. My complaint with traditional pb cookies has been that they’re too sweet and not peanut buttery enough. Well, complain no more!
Also, they’re filling; I could only eat one at a time. Thanks for the time you put in to perfect this cookie!
★★★★★
You’re most welcome Lorrie! Thanks for the review. 🙂
I think if I try to make these I will add chocolate chips. 🙂
Could you use solid oconut oil instead of butter here to make it vegan?
I haven’t tried that with this recipe, Jules, but I tested that with a different cookie (healthy chocolate chip) and I didn’t like how the cookie spread so much when it baked. If you’re okay with that, then go for it!
What are your thoughts on coconut sugar? I just bought some for another recipe and was thinking about using it for this.
Definitely go for it! We’re gradually switching to coconut sugar and I’ve found it works great in every recipe I’ve tested so far, including cookies!
Can I use powdered suger iifwe are new to changing over and don’t have turbino yet?
You can, but I would cut back a little bit. Try using 1/4 cup and tasting the dough. It should be “just sweet enough.” You could go up to 1/3 cup, but I think a full 1/2 cup of powdered sugar would be a pretty sweet cookie (in my opinion!).
Are you supposed to empty the blender between steps 3 &4 above? Seems like that’s the intention but unclear. Thanks!
Hi Stephanie! The blender gets emptied into a large bowl or stand mixer in step 2. That way it’s empty for oats in step 4. Does that help clarify?
AH! Steps 2-3 happen in the mixer, not the blender, right? I was taking that as empty the blender, then add the next things to the blender…. Think I follow now. Thanks!
Substituting a few tablespoons of corn starch for flour is making ordinary flour into cake flour, with a nicer crumb to the cake. Same principle as using it for these cookies, I guess.