The Best Peanut Butter Cookies with Claire Saffitz | Dessert Person

can i just eat one of those or they're too hot still oh they're pretty hot but they'll you want you want to risk it they're hot are you gonna burn your mouth no hey everyone i'm claire sapitz welcome to my home kitchen today i'm making a classic cookie peanut butter cookies and i'm going to show you three ways to form them one of them is the way that i do it in the book which is as a linzer it's a great peanut butter cookie but it's also kind of a play on the classic peanut butter and jelly [Music] anyone who's familiar with dessert person knows that i have difficulty ratings for the cookies and within the chapter they're organized from less difficult to more difficult and this cookie is the final cookie in the chapter meaning it's kind of one of the more difficult ones but it's only because they take a few steps to form them into lenses but it's a great peanut butter cookie so i really wanted to show it to you today because there is sort of like a beginner intermediate and more challenging way to form them so the first is just the classic cookie rolled into a ball times of the fork bake it that's it then the other two incorporate jam so the second way that's a little takes a little bit more work but it's just still pretty easy is a thumb print and then you fill it with jam then the third way is the one i have in the book which is you're making lenses which is really a sandwich cookie but you have like a cut out on one side so you can see the jam underneath so in terms of social equipment it is easier to put together in a stand mixer so i have my stand mixer with the paddle for the lenses all you'll need is a little some kind of a cutter that's very small that you can use to to punch out a center from the cookies yeah you could do exactly you could do what you've seen the show before good call you could use the wide end of a pastry tip to punch out a circle let me see what else i got i don't think i have too many other small ones [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay ingredients i have all-purpose flour kosher salt baking soda two large eggs room temp a cup of natural peanut butter that's very important vanilla extract i'm gonna use paste granulated sugar light brown sugar and unsalted butter plus to assemble them you'll need your jam of choice and some extra granulated sugar [Music] first step for the dough is to mix the dry ingredients all purpose flour a teaspoon and a half of kosher salt i like a really salty peanut butter cookie i'm using natural peanut butter so that's a peanut butter where the only ingredient is peanuts so i want like really concentrated flavor this particular brand which i really love is it's really salty which is what i like about it so then for baking soda a half teaspoon so just whisk this together [Music] i'm gonna start with my butter i left the butter out overnight so it's pretty soft portion of the fat in the recipe comes from the peanut butter itself which has all sorts of oils in it and i have a half cup each granulated and brown sugar my light brown sugar got like really lumpy so i switched to dark brown which is fine i'll just make the cookies a little bit darker in color so then my natural peanut butter so stir it really well the recipe calls for crunchy which i really love i want that texture in there but if you prefer smooth you smooth i mean this actually is the smooth variety of peanut butter but there's still lots of texture in it so i think that's important so then i'm going to turn this on low just to get everything combined and then increase the speed i'm going for not like super light and fluffy but i just want it to be kind of pale and light so i'm going to scrape this down it's nice and light and pale so i'm going to add the eggs i'll do one at a time so i'm going to add a dash of this vanilla paste so mix that in [Music] add all of the dry ingredients so everything goes in at once so i'm adding it all at once i don't want to over mix but if i were to turn it on i would just fling the flower everywhere so i'm going to pulse the flower in meaning just little short little starts and stops to the mixer on low and then mix until you have a smooth and very very soft dough almost batter like a little pulse and then once the flour mostly disappears you can let it go so now i want to really scrape down the bowl extremely well and fold the batter a few times because as great as a stand mixer is there does tend to be some unevenness as far as mixing so you can see it's really soft like we would not be able to form this into cookies very easily i'm gonna chill it down make sure that you scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl really well this area where it's shiny that's like unincorporated butter so that's what you want to fold in until it's all uniform for the three ways to form the cookie dough into a cookie classic thumb print and linter i'm going to chill the dough two ways one is just like flat all i want to do is cool down kind of in a slab i transfer about half the dough so i'm just going to kind of spread this into a block you could do it as a disc i think it's a little easier to keep it in a square shape pat it down so this is going to chill but for now i'll just set it over here and the other half i'm going to work into a log of dough work basically making our own cylinder of slice and baked cookie dough i like to start by working it into you know a somewhat long and skinny shape so you want to do this on parchment paper and you want to have the parchment be you know it extends several inches on either side of the dough so you need a little bit of clearance all the way around ideally you're using a bench scraper mine are both in the dishwasher but this is a very rigid bowl scraper so this will be fine you need basically a thin straight edge like this to help you so what you're going to do is take the parchment paper you're going to fold it up and over the dough like so and then you want it to lay flat against the other side of the parchment paper closest to you like this you can kind of use your hands to push it down then you're going to take your straight edge so it's maybe easier if i if i turn it around and you see see how it's kind of tucked in there and you have this cylindrical shape and this is the bottom piece of parchment and this is the other side fold it down so you're going to hold on to the bottom piece of parchment the side closest to you you're going to take your straight edge your bench scraper and you're going to press it on both pieces of parchment paper sort of at an angle toward the dough so see how my hand is holding down the side of the parchment that's closest to me i brought it over and sort of started to mold it around and then i'm using the edge of the scraper to really force the dough to fill out this shape so once you've done that and you kind of worked it all along the dough here's what you're going to do you're going to roll the whole thing up in the parchment so you need a piece of plastic even a little bit bigger than your parchment thanks vinnie so then you're going to transfer the dough to your plastic i just want to roll the dough tightly up in the plastic wrap and i'm just going to start to twist like this and then i'm going to go in from the other side and do the same thing make sure you're not like pinching you know dough out of the log and already i can feel like a tightening and an increase in tension in the log and in the dough and now i have this really compacted tight cylinder and the reason we go through this whole process is because the tighter the dough first of all the rounder it will be the more evenly shaped and also you won't get little like random air pockets where you slice down and your cookie falls apart because you're hitting air this can go into the fridge what i like to do is just kind of flatten the ends a little bit like this you're not going to have to slice off a lot and have any a lot of waste on the ends and then into the fridge along with this piece now i have ones that i already made last night so i'm going to pull those out and show you by the way when you store your dough especially soft dough like this i like to stand it on its end so that not only does one end stay flat but that it doesn't gain like a flat side to the cylinder the cylinder is for the lenser that's like the level three cookie the slightly more involved one so i'll start with level one which is just the most basic unfilled unjammy peanut butter cookie with just the little crosshatch from the fork okay so this goes back in the fridge i'm gonna portion our chilled dough for the classic peanut butter cookie i have some extra granulated sugar in a little bowl my fork and i have my scale so i think the easiest way to portion cold dough like this like dough is easier to scoop when it's softer but this is chilled so i have a scale and i'm just gonna weigh out one ounce portion so one ounce is like roughly two tablespoons i think it's just the easier way to do this and then i'm going to roll it so i have my one ounce pieces and then this dough it's actually nice and pliable it's a good temperature it's not going to crack which makes it easy to roll but it will warm up really fast so you want to work with some speed so you're just going to roll it in a ball like that and then what happens is the heat from your hands starts to soften the dough on the very outer layer and then that's actually good because it gives the sugar something to stick to in the sugar all over and then on the baking sheet i remember doing this with my mom when i was a kid she would make peanut butter cookies then you go in with the tines of the fork you go down in one direction and then down in the other so these cookies don't spread a lot actually so they're gonna mostly retain that shape and if you want to you can flatten it slightly before you apply that fork all right so do probably a dozen of these on the tray i have my oven preheating to 350 with the oven rack in the center then i move on to the second method of forming which is thumbprint [Music] so i have six of the classic little forked peanut butter cookies and then i'm gonna do six more on the same baking sheet of the thumb print which is almost even easier it's the same forming just rolling in a ball and tossing in a little sugar but i'm going to make a little depression in the center so i'm just going to get all six of the portions on the baking sheet and then show you how to do that this is like a little rounded half teaspoon measure i just want to use it to make like a cute little divot in the center and i'll probably have to do it again after it bakes just to reinforce that shape obviously i'm not pressing all the way down to the bottom of the baking sheet so these are going to bake at 350. they're going to spread a little bit not a lot and i'm going to go until they are golden brown and firm around the edges and then i'll pull them out so it'll be like probably 10 to 15 minutes action so they're done they're golden brown across the surface and even a little more brown along the edge they'll lose a little bit of the depression on those thumb prints so i like to go back in with the back of a spoon or whatever and just reform it like that so while these are hot i'm gonna fill them with a little bit of jam if i were filling the cooled cookies i would warm up the jam a little bit but since i'm putting the jam in still warm cookies it'll kind of melt and settle the jam a little bit plus this jam is not very lumpy this is a blueberry you can use any kind you like obviously grape would be kind of classic and in the book in fact there's a recipe for concord grape jam which you can make yourself if concord grapes are in season and if not then just buy you know use whatever store-bought one you like so i'll do three of blueberry and then i think i'll do some raspberry as well for a slightly different flavor so i'd say i'm putting about a teaspoon in each one okay so we have our level one and level two peanut butter cookies level one is just the classic fork level two is a thumb print we're gonna let these cool and then i'm gonna show you level three which is the lenser using our slice and bake i'm going to remove the plastic and the parchment and i'll show you how i just cut a piece of dough off and actually i have a little bit of parchment that got folded in here which is kind of uh you run that risk when you form it this way then i just slice down the side it's like a sausage you're taking off a casing or something so when i cut from a slice and bake i like to roll the log like so i like to roll it because it helps to maintain a regular shape and not have one end kind of flatten which is important because you want everything to be round so you'll just cut these rounds of dough and i'm cutting them i would say about a quarter inch thick so half of these will become the bottoms of the cookies and half of them will be the tops and so for half i'll punch out a shape and you'll get that'll be the tops of the lenses and i'm trying to cut relatively quickly because this is going to warm up fast if you feel like it's getting too warm to slice just put it back in the fridge or even the freezer for like a minute or two and that'll set the outside so there are my circles i'm going to pop this back in the fridge so it doesn't get too soft i'm going to sprinkle a little bit of granulated sugar tops and bottoms just all the cookies just for a little crunch they're not an overly sweet cookie at all and in fact i think people are accustomed to peanut butter being a sweet flavor but i actually find especially natural peanut butter that's unsweetened i find it to be very savory so a little extra sugar is nice and then here is my cutter see so now i'm going to punch out a center circle from half of them i have 3 6 9 12 15. well now i have an odd number so just press down and spin because the dough is off my rounded dough is stuck in the bottom of the um the cutter but just kind of coax it out with a skewer like this keep it on the baking sheet because you can you'll also make like little mini little mini bites of peanut butter cookie i'm going to bake these these will bake faster than the other two styles because they're just thinner they're already pretty much spread out and they will spread less because they'll set faster so i would say maybe 10 minutes or so and then we'll assemble our lenses now in the recipe in the book it has you because you're doing all of the dough this style it has you bake two sheets at a time upper and lower racks but we just have the one sheet so bake it in the center steps of our level three peanut butter cookies just to assemble our lenses so these have cooled i know here is an important thing to remember with lenses the bottoms the ones where i haven't punched the circle out you want to flip them over and you actually want to fill the side of the cookie that was on the baking sheet so the sugared side actually is the bottom of the cookie so you have to turn upside down does that make sense yeah that part goes on your tongue that part goes on your tongue exactly okay well said cow i'm just gonna add a little bit of jam and i don't like a thick layer and also the thicker you make it the more opaque it becomes and i like when you can see a little bit of the kind of jewel tone color of the jam plus too much jam and the top cookie will slide around a bit so that's i think a good amount to me and then you just put the top one on and you have your little like stained glass linser sandwich cookie so this one has blueberries in it so this might give me a little some issues but let's see and the idea of having all of the the idea of slicing all the cookies from one log is that there is no like matching up the tops and bottoms they all are the same shape more or less and if they're a little off that's fine so there you go i'm going to taste a linzer i think i'm going to do blueberry it feels like you're cutting the dough thin when you're slicing that log but then you put them together and obviously you double the thickness plus the jam so you get like a pretty substantial cookie but i like that because i want more cookie than jam as you can see they start to set as the cookie sits so they really become like little sandwiches the dough is so tender it has sort of like a sable quality sable means sandy like it has that really tender almost dissolving texture it's really so good i think the recipe itself is really easy you can do with a hand mixer the key is really just letting it chill so that you can work with it while it's cold and isn't so soft but it's really versatile you can make it into a classic rolled in sugar pressed down with a fork peanut butter cookie you can upgrade it a little bit to a thumb print which is just one little extra step although side note i would make them smaller than this because these are kind of big or you can take a little bit of time form them into a log and do it slice and bake style making these incredibly cute little lenses so thank you for watching so glad to be making recipes from dessert person and bringing them to you again and like and subscribe [Music] you

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 345,281

Keywords: peanut butter cookies, peanut butter cookie recipe, peanut butter cookies healthy, peanut butter, cookies, how to make peanut butter cookies, dessert, peanut butter cookies recipe, cookie recipes, best peanut butter cookies, best cookie recipes, easy peanut butter cookies, peanut butter cookie, easy cookie recipes, easy cookie recipe, peanut butter recipes, cookie recipe, peanut butter jelly, sandwich cookies, claire saffitz, bon appetit, gourmet makes, dessert person, grape

Id: vYZruvJMN_w

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022