Thick, Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
This is a Michael Barrett modified thick, chewy oatmeal raisin cookie recipe from the Smitten Kitchen.
I love good oatmeal cookies and haven’t had oatmeal cookies the way I like them since I was a kid. So I decided to make some the other day at the request of my dear one.
Only she wanted Choc Chip Oatmeal cookies, which I don’t care for.
When my kids were little, they got me a large glass cookie jar with a picture of the cookie monster from Sesame Street painted on the jar in blue. They could not believe how many cookies I could eat compared to their portions. They were such beautiful little beings – so observant and curious. I must have seemed huge and mysterious to them in many ways at the time – probably still do.
Bear in mind that at the time, I was a 33 year old eating machine with a metabolism like a coking coal forge in a blacksmith shop. So in reality a couple of dozen cookies here or there made little difference one way or the other.
This morning, when I made my morning organic steel cuts groats for breakfast, I doubled the normal batch. Leaving about 2 cups of cooked steel cut groats to throw into my first attempt at the Smitten Kitchen oatmeal cookie recipe - which I got at the link above. I love their website, by the way, the pictures of the cookies made me salivate…
I ad-libbed a bit and made the following changes. First off, I doubled the recipe. (Remember the cookie monster.) Actually there are a lot of bodies in the house this week and I wanted to be sure to have a couple for myself and I substituted the 2 cups of cooked organic groats for “all purpose flour”.
7/27: Follow up on that first batch of cookies.
They tasted great but were very dry and crumbly – although they disappeared fast. I really didn’t like the texture and the mouth feel of the first batch. So I decided to put the blog on hold until I made another batch to create a satisfactory – and different – outcome for the story.
On Sunday, I made a second batch. Start to finish including cooling time in the fridge about 1 hour 40 mins. This time here is the recipe I used:
- 3 cups of organic steel cuts oats,
- 1 Cup of organic brown rice flour
- 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour
- 1 teaspoon of baking soda
- 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon of salt
- in half of the batch I added chocolate chips ( I was out of raisins) or you can add 1 cup of raisins
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla
- 2 range free brown eggs
- 1 1/2 cups of light brown sugar
- 2 sticks of butter
- walnuts ( I forgot to add them)
Mix all the flours, baking soda, cinnamon, salt and raisins in a separate bowl. Mix them thoroughly by hand.
In another bowl put in the butter, brown sugar, eggs and vanilla and let it sit at room temperature until the butter is soft enough to mix it well with a spoon – 15 or 20 minutes. Then mix all of these ingredients well until the butter and sugar is evenly distributed through the mix.
Next mix in the contents of the other bowl (flours) into the sugar bit by bit until the dough texture is consistent throughout the mixture.
Place the cookie dough in the refrigerator until it is quite cold – maybe 30 to 45 minutes. Preheat the oven to 350 and place round dollops of dough (a tablespoon size) on a buttered sheet pan (or parchment paper) about two inches apart and cook for 10-12 minutes.
Here is something else I did that won great favor in the household:
At the 5 minutes point (I always use timers), I pulled out the sheet pan and sprinkled shreded coconut on the top of each cookie about 1/2 a teaspoon on each cookie (or less).
I have to get a sifter and next time I will grate and roast the coconut fresh instead of using packaged coconut.
The comments I got were:
- “These are the best cookies ever.”
- “Those cookies were fantastic.”
- and “MMMMMM.” munch munch munch…
They say the way to man’s heart is through his stomach. I’m beginning to believe the same is true for a woman’s heart. Anyway, I liked them and they are easy to make and they were a big success.
Tips: Measure accurately and always use timers.
Set a timer for everything:
- To remind you that the oven is warming to temp and there is nothing cooking inside.
- To remind you to check on the dough in the refrigerator.
- To check at the half way point to drizzle with coconut.
- To remind you to take the cookies out of the oven before they burn up.
The tricky part about cookies is that you actually have to take them out of the oven before they look done. The reason is that they continue to cook after you take them out of the oven. It’s called carry over cooking. Keep a close eye on the first sheet pan of cookies you take out to see if you need to adjust the time – up or down a little.
Also always let the cookies rest at least five minutes before you try to take them off the cookie sheet for a couple of reasons that I know about – there may be more. The cookies are basically molten when you first take them out of the oven. They solidify as the air temp on the outside of the cookie cools while the inside is still hot – which kind of creates a shell on the outside. The bottom of the cookies solidify last because the sheet pan is still hot for a while.
Two things you should not do:
Try to eat them hot right out of the oven. It’s like eating hot cheese toast from under the broiler because it smells so damn good and you’re hungry. You know this one time it will be ok if you blow on them to cool them off – not !! Let them cool.
Also, don’t try to remove them prematurely from the sheet pan with a spatula because you’ll cause many of them to crumble and break if the outside shell has not fully formed yet. You’ll actually get more cookies out of a batch with a little patience and even though they smell great hot, they actually taste better when they have solidified.
One last tip…
A good quality control mechanism is your nose. Smell the ingredients in the bowl before you put them in the fridge to cool. If you are careful, your nose will tell you if you left something out – like vanilla, for example. It’s amazing how integrated the olfactory system is with the palate.
I learned this as the owner of an espresso bar for 3 and a half years. The smell of the drink was an important component of quality control in making quality espresso drinks. Someone told me once that we never forget a smell – particularly one that is associated with something we like or something catastrophic because the olfactory feeds memory data directly into the brain.
In the same way that a dog never forgets your smell when they know you. Even when the eyes get old and they haven’t seen you for a long time, the tail will wag when they smell your hand.
Use your nose TOO when you cook. My dough smelled heavenly, by the way. As I smelled it, I thought: butter, vanilla, cinnamon, brown sugar… Smells just right.
Have a fabulous healthy cookie recipe day…
I AM Michael Barrett and I AM a Healthy Boomer.
