Published January 1, 2008.
You may think an oatmeal cookie should be moist and chewy. Thin and crispy oatmeal cookies can be irresistible—if, that is, you can get the texture just right.
The usual ingredients that give thick, chewy oatmeal cookies great texture—generous amounts of sugar and butter, a high ratio of oats to flour, a modest amount of leavener, eggs, raisins, and nuts—won't all fit in a thin, crispy cookie.
We wanted to adjust the standard oatmeal cookie ingredients to create a crispy, delicate cookie in which the simple flavor of buttery oats really stands out.
Given this cookie's simplicity, creating a rich butter flavor was critical, so we kept almost the same amount of butter (two sticks) as in our standard big, chewy oatmeal cookie, losing only 2 tablespoons. But we scaled back the amount of sugar to 1 1/4 cups (1 cup regular sugar and 1/4 cup brown sugar). One egg was sufficient to hold the cookies together, and a teaspoon of vanilla rounded out the flavor. Fine-tuning the amount and type of leavener led to a surprising result that solved our texture and shape problems. During baking, large carbon dioxide bubbles created by large amounts of baking soda and baking powder (we doubled the amounts from the standard recipe) caused the cookies to puff up, collapse, and spread out, producing the thin, flat cookies we were looking for. As an added bonus, these thin cookies proved to be less sensitive to the risk of overbaking than many other cookies. Baking the cookies all the way through until they were fully set and evenly browned from center to edge made them crisp throughout but not tough. And leaving them to completely cool on the baking sheet made them even crisper.
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