One of the cookies I’ve been baking variations on the most over the past year is a peanut butter cookie recipe. It really lends itself to experimentation because:

1. The base recipe can be very simple.
2. It’s already gluten and dairy free by default, which makes it friendly to the whole family. Only the egg needs to be substituted.
3. It’s easy to think of ways to extend the recipe. It’s possible to substitute mixtures of different nut butters/nuts, add some spices, sugars, flours, etc.

It’s also my niece’s favorite cookie that I make (or so I’m told…) so that’s the actual reason I’ve been making it so much.

My base-recipe here is from Alton Brown, and just has a handful of ingredients. My niece has an egg allergy, though, so it needs an egg substitute. My go-to egg replacement has been to use banana. As you might expect it goes very well with this cookie. In fact, it went so well the first time I tried that I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to make the base recipe with egg, or really try that much else in terms of egg simulations.

But you know what they say: If you’re going to make a cookie, you’re going to have to crack a few eggs… into the garbage and try some other things because your niece is allergic to eggs.

I guess I’m interested in three things here:

• What egg replacement comes closest to the standard recipe with egg?
• What egg replacements bring something else to the party worth incorporating? I know about banana already, but what about others?

To do this, I tried out a bunch of different egg replacements in this recipe and performed a bake (and taste test), comparing to the vanilla recipe.

Well all of the cookies had vanilla.

The Contenders

Boy, oh boy, there’s no shortage of egg replacements on the Internet. I’m sure there’s tons more things people have tried. If I revisit this I’ll have to pull in some more.

Nine peanut butter cookie configurations made the final configuration:

One Egg

First up: the reference design. The gold standard by which others will be compared.

I’m actually pretty excited to try this out - I don’t think I’ve ever made just the plain recipe by itself before.

Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Egg Replacer

Next up, one of many commercial products built for egg replacement. It’s billed as gluten free, but pretty much every alternative I saw was also gluten free? I guess it’s good to be clear and it’s not as ridiculous as it could be.

This stuff has potato starch, tapioca flour, baking soda, and psyllium husk fiber. The baking soda seems kinda odd for cookies, but maybe it’s intended more for applications where the eggs contribute to leavening.

Chia Seed

One of the most popular egg substitues, chia seeds are transformed into an egg-like slop by adding some water and waiting 15 minutes. It appears you can grind the chia seeds or leave them whole. I’ll leave them whole for this test, since it makes it more distinct from the other more powder-like substitutions…

Both flax seed and chia seed are popular. I picked chia because I already had it and there’s only room for one seed representative on the list.

Chickpea Flour / Besan

When mixed with water, chickpea flour becomes sort of like a sludgier batter that is not entirely unlike an egg. I’m pretty interested how this turns out flavor-wise.

Banana

What I’ve been doing by default. Where one would include an egg, instead one adds mash up half a ripe banana thoroughly and then incorporates it. The mashed banana ends up pretty egg-like before going in.

Applesauce

Another semi-common substitution for eggs in baking recipes. It’s not seen super commonly in cookies, but moreso in breads/cakes. I’m pretty interested to see if there’s any apple flavor that’ll come through. That said, I’m a bit doubtful that it’ll get close to the binding/structure that an egg brings to the party, and it seems a bit too wet… But we’ll see!

Condensed Milk

This one is weird and I don’t get how it’ll work right. But people say it works! It seems to be recommended more for brownies and cakes, though. I’m curious to see how much sweeter the cookies are, if at all.

Silken Tofu

To incoporate, one blends or purees the tofu and then adds it in. This is the wildcard. I have no idea how this one will turn out.

None Egg

That is, take out the egg and don’t try to substitute it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to these cookies if we don’t even try to pretend there’s a binder involved - just peanuts, sugar, vanilla, baking soda, and a prayer. I’m anticipating dry crumbliness here.

Conversions

As best as clicking a few links could find, here’s the ideal conversion ratios for each of these substitutes. Interestingly, the total volume of the egg substitue seems to vary - around 3 tablespoons on the low end, and 6 tablespoons (1/3 cup) on the high end. Most are around 1/4 cup.

Egg Substitute	Conversion (1 egg : <>)
Egg	1 egg
Egg Replacer	1 T. replacer, 2 T. water
Chia Seed	1 T. chia seeds, 3 T. water
Chickpea Flour / Besan	3 T. flour, 3. T. water
Banana	1/2 banana
Applesauce	1/4 c
Condensed Milk	1/4 c
Silken Tofu	1/4 c
Nil	Segmentation Fault (core dumped)

Let’s Bake

Before we start, I’ll note that I have deviate from the recipe in one way - Alton’s recipe calls for store-bought smooth peanut butter, but I’ll be roasting peanuts and making my own. This might have an impact on the texture of the end product (perhaps a subject of future experiments). Right now, I do it just because it’s easy and it’s cool to say I make my own peanut butter.

I plan to make one batch of the normal cookies (so 1 egg), and then half-batches of each of the variants. This leads to 5x the original recipe volume in total.

This means I need uh, just under 3 pounds of peanut butter - I guess I’m making a lot of these.

I’m going to prepare all the doughs one day, and then bake the next.

Peanut Butter

I hadn’t made this much volume of peanut butter before, but the process is easy:

The nuts were processed for as long as my patience allowed.

I will say if you do end up making tons of peanut butter, your food processor will probably thank you if you do it in batches. Mine got through processing the full 3 lbs fine, but it wasn’t a particularly happy camper about it (it, uh, started smoking a bit and had to cool down in the middle of processing).

Dough

The sugars and peanut butter were combined in a stand mixer (600g light brown sugar, 600g sugar, 1340g peanut butter). It was just too much to reasonably do by hand.

The dough got portioned out into ~250-254 gram portions, with double portion was reserved for the “normal egg” batter. Each half-batch had 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, 1/8 tsp kosher salt, and the egg replacements added. After all the dough was mixed, it was rolled into 1 oz balls.

I did remember to halve the amounts for the egg replacements in the half-batches. Thanks for checking.

Interestingly, the doughs started to differentiate themselves quite a bit in terms of wetness:

To order them:

1. Applesauce (wettest)
2. Tofu
3. Banana
4. Chia Seeds
5. Actual Egg
6. Chickpea Flour
7. Bob’s Red Mill Replacer
8. Nil
9. Sweetened Condensed Milk (most dry)

Some poorly-framed comparison pictures below:

Most of these were perfectly shapeable, varying in consistency a bit but still formable. There were only difficulties at the top and bottom of the list - the applesauce dough was incredibly sticky and couldn’t quite hold a spherical shape, and it was difficult to roll the milk batch without crumbles falling off everywhere.

It’s fitting that in terms of wetness, the actual egg landed right in the middle. Of all of the replacements, the chia egg batter was probably closest-feeling to the real egg.

The formed balls were popped in the refrigerator to be baked the next day.

Actually Baking Now

On Sunday, when baking, the doughs were removed from the fridge and baked in order of wettest to driest - the drier cookie doughs were not very shapeable right out of the fridge.

A criss-cross pattern was made while flattening a cookie by dipping a fork in water and then pressing it into the ball while sliding the tines across the ball, to make an imprint with some lines. Do the same thing perpendicularly to make the criss-cross. (Watch Alton’s video!) Note: Dipping the fork in water is important to prevent the dough from sticking after pressing the fork into the cookie.

After this, each set of cookies was baked for 10 minutes at 350F.

A lot of baking later, and I get to show off this grid of bake photos:

Applesauce

Tofu

Banana

Chia

Egg

Bob’s Red Mill

Chickpea

Nil / No Replacement

Sweetened Condensed Milk

The Lineup

With all those done, now we have a frankly intimidating wall of cookies:

Let’s make this a bit more inviting and try them out.

There we go.

Tasting Notes

Well here’s what I thought. If you’re getting some of these and would like to try them without knowing my thoughts, then pause here for now.

I’ll start with one note:

I think the base recipe was a bit too sweet for my tastes. Maybe it’s cookie fatigue from the weekend though.

And now for the comparison.

Applesauce: This cookie was above all, pretty chewy. No real apple flavor or anything like that. A very flat cookie. If chewy cookies are your thing, this is a good option for you.

Tofu: The tofu cookie was probably the chewiest of the bunch, and second-flattest. I’d probably like it a lot if it didn’t feel so oily for some reason! I’m not sure what made it do that. It’s also got a hard-to-pin but ever-so-slightly unpleasant (soy?) taste on the back end.

The flatness of the cookie leaves me wondering - why was silken tofu the recommended choice? It seems like a firmer tofu might be better here - maybe worth revisiting.

Banana: Wham! This cookie whacks you in the face with banana flavor. I could tell in the past that the cookies were sort of banana-y, but I didn’t realize how different it was from the base recipe. The cookie’s got some crunch on the outside, but its main downside is that the the chew doesn’t stick around nearly as long as I’d like.

Chia: Very close to the normal cookie. Two things are different that I can tell: One, when you hit a chia seed while chewing it has that chia seed crunch. Two, when chewing the cookie doesn’t quite stick around as long as the egg (but longer than any other substitution). It’s very close though!

Egg: The base cookie. It’s very tasty, and the way it stands out is just how long you can chew on the cookie before it dissolves. It’s also a good middle ground on the soft/hard cookie scale - not super soft/chewy, but not extra crunchy.

Egg Replacer: A bit drier. If I added a bit more water to the mix, it might actually end up closer to the egg recipe. Otherwise, it’s fine.

Chickpea: Starting to get a bit more shortbread-like, and it’s not as chewy in the center. There’s some chickpea flavor present, which is interesting but maybe doesn’t meld with the rest of the cookie as well as I’d hoped. Kind of dry.

Nil: Very weird. The cookie starts off very grainy and melts away almost instantly. Not a pleasant experience compared to the other cookies. It also falls apart very easily when handling.

Condensed Milk: This guy. It’s impossible to shape and as a result it doesn’t look very great. But it is pretty satisfying. I’d say it provides a good example of an actually crunchy cookie, that none of the other substitutions provided. The extra marginal sweetness from the condensed milk didn’t seem to matter too much.

I’d rate these, in terms of peanut butter cookie goodness:

1. Egg
2. Chia
3. Applesauce
4. Banana
5. Condensed Milk
6. Egg Replacer
7. Chickpea
8. Tofu
9. Nil

So there are some new kings - Banana, as good as it is, is dethroned! Chia took the overall closest simulation, and Applesauce made flat, chewy, delicious cookies.

The top 5 are configurations I’d definitely try again, depending on what kind of cookie I wanted. I’m surprised that the chia substitution did so well, and that applesauce turned out making as good of a chewy cookie as it did (I was a bit worried by how wet the dough was). Maybe half-chia, half-banana would lead to egg-free cookie perfection.

The egg replacer one seemed dryer than I’d hoped - maybe it needs more water than normal for this use?

It doesn’t seem that chickpea flour is actually the right taste fit for this cookie, and the tofu substitution led to a really chewy cookie but had some weird side effects. But everything was way better than replacing the egg with nothing/air.

But really, I guess these are wholly preliminary results. Once I find out which one my niece likes the best that’ll be the winner.