Copycat “Salty Oats” Cookies

Let me introduce you to the best oatmeal cookies I ever had. AKA the heartiest, chewiest oatmeal raisin cookies ever known to man.

I can’t remember when I had my first bite into one of Cape Cod’s Kayak Cookies‘ salty oats cookies but it was love at first bite. These come in large packs of 3 massive scone-sized cookies. Like hockey pucks, the thickness on them is incredible. I do remember reading the description on the package and being instantly intrigued: “Subtly sweet, curiously salty” … That’s 4 words I would use to describe my ideal food. Seriously.

What they hadn’t mentioned was the buttery hearty crumb structure. Crunchy on the outside, extremely chewy on the inside, to the point of gluing your mouth shut. Oh yes. I never said I wasn’t weird.

I’ve googled many a copy-cat recipe and tried at least three. Nope, it wasn’t the same. Good cookies, but not exactly the same cookies. One was too buttery, another too sweet… Disappointed, I finally had to take the matters into my own hands.

Little known fact about me: I have a PhD in computer science from Harvard University, and I have been a Google engineer for 5+ years.

It was time to put on my scientist/engineer hat. Guys, I reverse-engineered this ish.

The information that I had was the list of ingredients and the nutritional info on the label.

The ingredients were the usual suspects: Flour, oats, eggs, butter, sugar, etc. But how much of each? Well the ingredients are always listed in decreasing order. If most of the cookie (I’m guessing by weight) is flour then flour is the first ingredient. So that gave me some information.

Then I had the nutritional info: Calories, carbs, fat, protein, fiber and sugar per 3 oz of cookie. Here’s what I did, I entered a ballpark recipe into MyFitnessPal: It went something like 1 egg, 2 sticks of butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 2 cups rolled oats, 1/2 cup raisins. Then I started tweaking the amounts of these while making sure to maintain the decreasing weight order from the list of ingredients until I hit basically the exact same calories, macros, sugar and fiber. Basically constrained optimization by hand! (guess I could have written some code to do it as well…)

And voila! I had a recipe, in THEORY.

And I followed it. I watched these babies bake with anticipation. The moment they came out of the oven all thick and golden and smelling like sweet buttery heaven, I knew it. I had cracked the code on the salty oats cookie.

One bite confirmed my first impression. There it was, the exact same cookie. SCIENCE, it works.

The only difference is my recipe uses whole grain flour so the cookies will have a bit more color to them. And they’re single-serving sized rather than 2-servings-in-one size. But size is more up to you, feel free to bake up 12 breakfast scone sized ones. Something I have done and enjoyed immensely.

Without further ado, here’s my hardest-earned recipe ever.