How To Make Satisfying Peanut Butter-Oatmeal Cookies With Just 3 Ingredients

If you're a big fan of peanut butter cookies, you definitely aren't alone. At Chowhound, we're pretty loud supporters of a good ol' PB cookie ourselves, and we have a mean bakery-style peanut butter cookies recipe to prove it. But sometimes, you don't want to bust out a whole pantry full of wet and dry ingredients just to scratch that itch for a good peanut butter cookie. Thus, we present to you an easy three-ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe. All you need? Peanut butter, quick oats, and maple syrup.

We have a good overview of the best and worst brands of natural peanut butter to use as a guideline. For this recipe, we suggest sticking to a natural, unsweetened peanut butter. Don't worry about the sugar: that's where the maple syrup comes in. You're going to want about ½ cup of peanut butter, ¼ cup of maple syrup, and ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons of quick oats. Simply mix the ingredients together until you get a paste that you can roll into ball shapes and place on your tray, and bake 'em at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 10 minutes. That's it: three ingredients, 10 minutes, and you're done! Prep time and cleanup is a cinch too, since you won't be dirtying tons of dishes.

With this triple combo, you nix the need for flour, granulated sugar, eggs, and any dairy ingredients like milk or butter. But how does that work, exactly? Basically, each of these three components acts as a sub for something that a typical cookie recipe's ingredients gets done. Let's look at granulated sugar, for example. This stuff helps retain water and add sweetness to your goodies, but peanut butter is already plenty moist and you get the necessary sweetness from the addition of maple syrup.

Meanwhile, flour is a binding agent in cooking, and so are oats. The quick oats give you all the binding power you could need. Eggs also serve as a binder, and maple syrup replaces them in this recipe. Finally, you have all the fat you could ask for in the peanut butter. The oil serves as a great replacement for butter and the fat in milk, still leaving your cookies with a moist, tender crumb. You can check the absolute best way to mix natural peanut butter out to ensure that you're adding fully emulsified peanut butter to the mix, which will help you get evenly textured cookies all the way through. Just give these a try and you'll have a hard time going back.