Chewy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

What ingredients make these cookies so good:

• Old fashioned oats. Old fashioned oats are essential to these cookies! Check out our explanation below on why you want to use old fashioned oats and not quick oats!
• Brown sugar. These cookies use a hefty amount of brown sugar! The brown sugar flavor in these cookies blends so perfectly with the oats and cinnamon. The molasses in the brown sugar also helps make these cookies chewy!
• Cinnamon. We use just a touch of cinnamon in these cookies, ¼ teaspoon might seem like a tiny amount, and it is, but it adds just enough warmth to these cookies to make them over the top good!
• Cornstarch. Cornstarch will help keep these oatmeal chocolate chip cookies soft and chewy for days after you bake them!

Old Fashioned Oats vs. Quick Oats

Quick Oats

Quick oats, sometimes called instant oats, are SUPER processed. They are pre-cooked and dried, and rolled out to be ultra thin for quick cooking. Quick oats do not retain their texture well, if you’ve ever eat them for breakfast you’ll know they are much mushier than old fashioned oats. For this reason, we do NOT want to use them in our cookies. These will give you a much softer cookie and texture and moisture ratio will be completely off.

Old Fashioned Oats

Old fashioned oats, sometimes called rolled oats or whole oats, are what we want to use in these chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies! These oats have also been flattened when they’re processed but, they’re not nearly as small or thin as quick oats.

Old fashioned oats are different than steel-cut oats, so don’t think they are interchangeable. Old fashioned oats hold their shape during cooking much better than quick oats and because they absorb more moisture than quick oats we will get a better texture in our cookie. Old fashioned oats are ideal for cookies, granola bars, muffins and will give us the distinct oat-y texture we are looking for!

Check out our video on how to make these cookies!

Cooking Temperature and time

I recommend using ¼ cup of cookie dough baked at 425 degrees which is extremely high for most cookies and baking them for a short amount of time 6-8 minutes. This will give the cookies a nice crisp exterior and soft interior and once completely cooled they will have a great chewy texture

Ideal Cookie Size and How to make them smaller

The reason I recommend using ¼ cup of dough is this is the size that has been tested and proved ideal for texture and spread at this oven temperature and bake time

If you would like to make your cookies smaller, I recommend you decrease the temperature to 375 and keep and eye on the cookies after they bake for 5 minutes to check and see when they’re done

Measure your flour!

Don’t forget to measure your flour correctly! Too much flour is one of the biggest culprits of dry and crumbly baked goods! I personally always weigh my flour (I do 130g per cup of flour) for precise accuracy. But we have a great tutorial showing you how to measure your flour properly!

Freeze your Cookie dough!

If you’re like me, I love to keep cookie dough in the freezer ready to bake up at any time! Here’s what you’ll want to do to freeze your cookie dough:

• Scoop your cookie dough into ¼ cup balls and place them on a pan and freeze for 1 hour. This will help the cookie dough balls keep their shape in the freezer. Pre scooping the dough makes them super easy to separate in the future
• Once the cookie dough is frozen, you can place them in a large Tupperware container and stack them on top of each other. I like to place a layer of wax paper or parchment paper between the layers of cookie dough to prevent them from sticking to each other.

How to bake the cookie dough from frozen

Before baking the cookies let the frozen cookie dough balls sit out for 15 minutes before baking (you can do this while the oven is preheating) and then bake according to normal instructions. You may need to add an additional 1-2 minutes to the bake time. Use your best judgment when doing this!

Try out these other cookie recipes too!