- Elimination
- Reintroduction
- Maintenance
- Snack
- Dessert
Flourless Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies
Four ingredients, one bowl, no flour to substitute and nothing to get wrong. The dessert to have on hand when the craving arrives at 9pm.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 12 min
- Total
- 22 min
- Serves
- 12
Published
Ingredients
Makes 12 cookies. Each ingredient is labelled with its FODMAP status at this quantity.
- Portion-dependent
250 g smooth peanut butter, unsweetened
Low FODMAP at 50 g per serve. Check the label for added inulin, chicory root or honey.
- Low FODMAP
150 g soft light brown sugar
Sucrose is FODMAP-free at normal amounts.
- Low FODMAP
1 egg
- Low FODMAP
1 tsp vanilla extract
- Low FODMAP
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- Low FODMAP
1/4 tsp flaky salt
- Portion-dependent
100 g dark chocolate, 70 percent, chopped
Low FODMAP at 30 g per serve. Milk chocolate is lower, at 20 g, and white lower still.
What the labels mean
- Low FODMAPSafe at the serving size listed.
- Portion-dependentLow FODMAP only up to the serving size listed — larger servings stack.
Method
Step 1: Heat the oven to 175°C / 350°F fan and line two baking sheets with parchment. These spread, so give them room.
Step 2: Beat the peanut butter, brown sugar, egg and vanilla together in a bowl until the mixture is smooth, thick and slightly glossy — about a minute by hand.
Step 3: Stir in the bicarbonate of soda and salt, then fold through most of the chopped chocolate, holding back a handful.
Step 4: Roll into 12 balls, space them well apart on the sheets and flatten each one slightly with your palm. Press the reserved chocolate into the tops.
Step 5: Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look underdone. They firm up as they cool and this is the difference between chewy and dry.
Step 6: Leave on the sheet for 5 minutes before moving them — straight off the oven they will fall apart, since there is no flour holding them together.
Notes and swaps
- Check the peanut butter label before you buy. Some reduced-fat and "high protein" brands add inulin or chicory root fibre, which is concentrated fructan and precisely what you are avoiding.
- The dough freezes better than the cookies do. Roll the balls, freeze them on a tray, and bake from frozen with an extra 2 minutes.
- Natural peanut butter separates. Stir the jar thoroughly first, or the dough will be oily at the bottom and stiff at the top.
Most low-FODMAP baking recipes are ordinary recipes with the flour swapped out, and they taste like it. The blends are expensive, they behave differently from what they replaced, and half of them lean on ingredients that create a new problem while solving the old one.
The better move is to cook things that never needed flour.
Why these hold together
Peanut butter is roughly half fat and a quarter protein. When you beat it with sugar and an egg, the protein sets in the oven and the sugar caramelises — which is structurally most of what flour and butter do in a conventional cookie. Nothing is missing, so nothing needs substituting.
That also makes the recipe unusually hard to get wrong. There is no gluten to overdevelop and no flour-to-liquid ratio to balance.
Peanuts are the exception among legumes
It is reasonable to be suspicious. Legumes are the classic high-FODMAP category — chickpeas, lentils and dried beans are loaded with galacto-oligosaccharides, and they are among the first things people cut.
Peanuts are botanically legumes but they do not carry a meaningful GOS load. Monash puts peanut butter comfortably in the low-FODMAP range at 50 g, which is more than most people eat in a sitting. Each cookie here holds about 21 g.
The catch is not the peanuts. It is what gets added to them.
Read the jar
This is the one place this recipe can genuinely go wrong, and it happens at the supermarket rather than in the kitchen.
A growing number of peanut butters — particularly the reduced-fat, “high protein” and “gut friendly” ones — add inulin or chicory root fibre to replace the fat. Inulin is fructan. It is the same compound that makes onion and garlic a problem, in a more concentrated form, marketed as a health benefit. Some products also sweeten with honey, which brings excess fructose.
What you want is a jar whose ingredients read: peanuts, salt. Occasionally just peanuts.
The chocolate ceiling
Dark chocolate is low FODMAP at 30 g. Milk chocolate is lower at 20 g, because the lactose counts, and white chocolate lower again.
At 100 g across twelve cookies, each one carries about 8 grams. Two cookies is a comfortable serving on both counts. It is worth knowing the number rather than guessing, because chocolate is the ingredient people reach for a third of without registering it.
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