I baked over 2000 peanut cookies using various recipes before I came up with these tips to make the Best Easy Traditional 4-ingredients Chinese Peanut Cookies, 1 of the most popular Chinese New Year cookies, naturally vegan and 1 of my bestsellers!
Jump to:
- Why make Chinese New Year peanut cookies (even when it's not Chinese New Year)?
- Chinese peanut cookies vs American peanut butter cookies
- What ingredients do you need?
- Roasting your own peanuts is worth the effort
- What kind of fat to use?
- What type of flour?
- What sweetener should I use?
- How big should the cookies be?
- Decorating the cookies
- How many calories are in these cookies?
- The Best Traditional Chinese New Year Peanut Cookies
Why make Chinese New Year peanut cookies (even when it's not Chinese New Year)?
- They're delicious- I've once had someone order order 20 jars from me! (Yes, I sell homemade traditional cookies during Chinese New Year and these peanut cookies are my bestsellers!) The cookies have a bit of crunch yet still melt in your mouth.
- They're super easy to make: you don't need a mixer. If you buy peanut powder from the shop (instead of making your own), you won't need any equipment at all to make them- everything can be mixed by hand.
- And they're naturally vegan to boot!
Chinese peanut cookies vs American peanut butter cookies
In case you're not familiar with Chinese peanut cookies, they're a traditional homemade Chinese cookie, usually seen during Chinese New Year (CNY) and are not the same as American peanut butter cookies. Both are easy to make but the latter uses peanut butter whilst the former uses ground peanuts. Due to the shortening in peanut butter, American peanut cookies are puffy whilst the ideal Chinese Peanut cookie is simultaneously crunchy yet still melts-in-the-mouth.
(Click here for menu ideas for a CNY feast that 1 person can cook solo.)
What ingredients do you need?
Traditional Chinese peanut cookies only require 4 ingredients: peanuts, flour (more on whether to use rice or wheat flour below), fat, sugar and a tinge of salt (which boosts the flavour exponentially- not included in the ingredient count as I've yet to see a kitchen that doesn't have salt!). If you're not vegan, an egg yolk wash also makes the cookies more attractive. Since there are only 4 ingredients, slight changes in the proportions or ingredient (eg using all-purpose flour versus rice flour) affect the cookie substantially- I baked 11 variations of these recipes to come up with this ultimate peanut cookie recipe:
- Rasa Malaysia
- GuaiShuShu
- MalaysiaChineseKitchen
- Roti&Rice (pretty similar to the MalaysiaChineseKitchen recipe so I'm not sure why I used it too- bad planning on my part, I must confess.)
Roasting your own peanuts is worth the effort
Since we are making peanut cookies, I figured I should pay more attention to the peanuts used and experimented with several types (listed from worst to best, as rated by blind taste testers):
- grated peanuts from a speciality baking store
- grated peanuts from a general supermarket
- peanut powder from the store
- home baked peanuts
- snacking peanuts from the supermarket (Roasted and salted)
- home fried peanuts (3 different batches fried for 7, 8 and 9 minutes consecutively)
I did blind taste testing with several testers and the home roasted peanuts won hands-down. Probably because so few ingredients are involved, everyone could unerringly differentiate which cookies were made with home roasted nuts and which weren't. Interestingly, the grated peanuts purchased from the baking shop did not taste as good as regular supermarket grated peanuts- so the speciality shop doesn't always offer the best quality products!
Baking vs frying peanuts
Fried peanuts were tastier than baked (you don't say): when frying, you want to take the nuts to the edge of burnt such that they almost taste burnt when eaten alone, but somehow this only enhances the peanut-y taste when blended and baked into a cookie. I found that frying for 8 minutes worked best for me but this may vary depending on the size and type of your peanuts. (In Chinese cooking, we have peanuts which are meant for cooking and peanuts which are meant for soups!)
I'm sure it's possible to get nice tasting nuts through baking however both the MalaysiaChineseKitchen and Roti&Rice recipes called for baking the nuts at 180C for 12-15 minutes to get light brown nuts: 18 minutes later, my peanuts were still white and soft. I had to fry them for am extra 4 minutes to get them to crisp up. (Perhaps adding some oil would have helped but neither recipe stipulated the usage of oil.) Personally, baking nuts for cookies is not for me (unless I one day become super concerned about my health!)
Grind the peanuts as finely as possible (but not till they become peanut butter)
The first recipe I tried merely said to use ground peanuts and didn't specify how finely they should be ground. I used shop grated nuts and the resulting cookie was way too loose and pretty much crumbled once touched- not quite the crisp yet melt-in-the-mouth effect that I wanted as they could barely be picked up off the baking mat without disintegrating! Lesson learnt: the peanuts need to be in powder form- if you've bought grated peanuts, blitz them in the blender before making these Chinese cookies. However, don't overblend as this will give you peanut butter- blend small batches of nuts at a time to have better control over the fineness of the nuts.
In addition, recipes which used proportionately more peanut were more popular: people can taste the difference when you use more nut than flour in each cookie (in terms of weight).
To add peanut butter or not
Some recipes call for peanut butter, which I find weird. You don't really find peanut butter in traditional Chinese recipes! However, if you really, really must use peanut butter- it's an easy fix but note it will change the texture- make sure it's pure, natural peanut butter and not something like Skippy's (which has shortening etc in it)- if not, the mouthfeel of the cookie will change and become puffy.
The addition of an egg, as called for in the GuaiShuShu recipe, was also not well-received: perhaps the leavening effect of the eggs compromised the cookie's texture?
What kind of fat to use?
Traditionally, these Chinese New Year cookies were made with pork lard. Interestingly, none of the recipes I referenced used lard in their cookies and I, too, decided to forego lard due to health considerations and hassle.
Moreover, using nut oil enhances the peanut flavour! Be careful that you're using the right kind of nut oil- most nut oils in the supermarket are actually nut-scented vegetable oil! I only realised this after my Aunt. who has worked in the edible oil industry for decades and was 1 of my testers, told me- when I checked the fine print on my bottle, lo and behold, it was indeed a nut-flavoured oil. (You can still make the cookies with nut-scented vegetable oil, sunflower oil, canola etc but the majority of my testers preferred cookies made with 100% pure groundnut oil.)
Rasa Malaysia was the only recipe that called for the addition of shortening (as well as oil) and I was curious as to its purpose so I tried her recipe with shortening and without shortening. Unanimously, all the testers strongly preferred the version without shortening although they couldn't pinpoint the exact reason why: some said the version without shortening was sweeter and others said it tasted "less peanuty."
What type of flour?
Some of the recipes say the rice flour makes the cookie more melt-in-the-mouth and indeed the cookie was more crumbly- however, all the tasters preferred the texture of a cookie made with 100% all-purpose flour to a cookie made with 100% rice flour. Nonetheless, if you want a gluten-free cookie, you can substitute the all-purpose flour with the same quantity of rice flour, keeping everything else the same.
Note: my Aunt says she used to make peanut cookies for Chinese New Year from sugar, lard and peanuts only in the 70s and 80s (i.e. no flour), making it a 3-ingredients cookie instead of a 4-ingredients cookie! Must be super tasty peanut cookies if expensive!
What sweetener should I use?
The cookies made with icing sugar were slightly softer whilst those made with granulated sugar had a crunchier taste. I use either sugar interchangeably depending on who I'm baking for (and their preference).
Note I would not recommend substituting sugar with honey as honey has a strong natural flavour which impacts the taste of the cookie. It's not that the resulting cookie tastes bad but it just isn't a traditional CNY Chinese Peanut Cookie. (It's also not vegan FYI) If making these cookies for a vegan friend, make sure you use vegan sugar as a lot of white sugar is made from bone char and thus is not vegan.
How big should the cookies be?
If you're weighing the cookies individually, don't go above 10g per cookie as you want to keep them bite sized. (The crumbly nature of the cookies makes it challenging to bite them into half without making a total mess.) Personally, after my first few batches, my meticulousness waned and I started finding the weighing process tedious. Instead, I now use a ½ Tablespoon scoop to scoop the dough before rolling it into a ball. (You want curves on your cookies as straight lines/ hard edges would break more easily.)
Decorating the cookies
To jazz up the CNY cookies, you could use a straw to poke a whole in the centre of each cookie or, as is my preference, press half a peanut into the middle of each cookie. If you're not vegan, I strongly recommend washing the cookies with egg yolk as they look much more attractive when dark brown. (I tried 6 washes: whole egg wash, egg yolk wash, whole egg with milk wash, whole egg with nut oil wash, whole egg with water wash. An egg yolk wash was voted as the most attractive cookie finish.) For vegans, you can also use vegan cookie washes instead of an egg wash.
Alternatively, if you want to try something new, you could give these classic Chinese cookies a twist by pressing a teardrop-shaped milk chocolate candy in the centre of the cookie a la American peanut butter blossom cookies! For the less adventurous, you can substitute the chocolate with a dab of peanut butter.
How many calories are in these cookies?
Chinese New Year cookies and snacks are infamous for being terrible for your waistline, so much so that every January or February, you will see the Singaporean media littered with articles on the calorie information of the various CNY goodies! According to LadyIronChef, a popular Singaporean food blogger, CNY nut cookies (whether peanut of almond) have 72 calories per slice. I've yet to do a detailed study on the calorie information of my cookies, but maybe I will this year!
The Best Traditional Chinese New Year Peanut Cookies
Ingredients
- 320 g peanuts (0.7 pounds) You will need an additional (approximately) 50 peanuts if you are decorating the top of each peanut cookie with half a peanut
- 180 ml pure groundnut oil You will need extra to fry the peanuts
- 1 teaspoon salt You may get very salty pockets in your cookies if your salt isn't fine enough, so blitz the salt with the peanuts to get a more consistent taste.
- 280 g all-purpose flour (0.62 pounds)
- 150 g icing sugar (0.33 pounds) Can be substituted with granulated sugar
- 2 egg yolks beat together for egg wash. Add a few drops of water if the consistency is too thick to brush on smoothly
Instructions
- Place all the peanuts in a colander and rinse well. Spread them out in a single layer to air dry till they're dry to the touch. (This may take several hours. I tend to wash mine in the morning and fry in the afternoon.)
- Pour enough oil into your wok/ pot to cover your nuts and heat on medium-high. When hot enough, the oil should wave slightly- if it is smoking, it is too hot! Once the oil is hot enough, add enough peanuts to cover the bottom of the pan- do not overcrowd as this will cause the oil temperature to drop too drastically. (You may have to fry the nuts in several batches.) If the oil is hot enough, the nuts should sizzle and bubble. Stir the nuts constantly for about 7-8 minutes before removing them from the oil and placing them on kitchen towels to drain the oil. (Note the peanuts will continue darkening once removed from the oil) Repeat the steps till all the nuts have been fried.
- Let the peanuts cool and once cool enough to touch, remove the skins. (This is indeed a tedious process so if you can get good quality shop roasted snacking nuts, you may want to use those instead. The only negative is that they can cost quite a bit more!)
- Once the nuts are cooled and skinned, take out 50 peanuts, split them into half and cover. Blend the remaining nuts with the salt in your food processor till it becomes a powder. (Do this in batches so you have better control over the texture.)
- Sift the flour and icing sugar together before adding it to the peanut powder. (If using granulated sugar, it is too big to pass through the colander easily so just sift the flour.)
- The amount of oil you will need varies depending on how much oil is produced after you've blended the nuts so add approximately 90% of the oil to the peanut powder, flour and sugar mixture first. Mix well. If the mixture is too dry, add the rest of the oil and mix till homogenous.
- Use a ½ tablespoon scoop to scoop out the dough then roll each scoop into a round ball. The cookies don't spread in the oven and may be placed very close to each other on the baking mat.
- Take out the peanuts that you've separated into halves earlier and press half into the centre of each cookie.
- Use a brush to brush the egg yolk wash over each cookie, diluting slightly with water if it is too thick.
- Bake at 350F/ 176C till golden brown (approximately 17-20 minutes) Turn the baking tray around halfway through baking for a more consistent colour (as ovens have hot spots, usually at the back corners)
- Allow to cool then enjoy these crunchy snacks!
Notes
A rather long post for a simple and easy-to-make cookie but I hope these tips will come in handy for your Chinese New Year baking. If you have a family CNY Chinese peanut cookie recipe that you feel is the best, I'd love to hear about it. Last but not least, thanks to all my testers for dutifully eating 100s of my homemade peanut cookies!
P.S. Eating too many nut cookies is heaty - it can lead to a sore throat- so don't forget to make some cooling foods such as jellies!
Genevieve says
I love Chinese peanut cookies and I've always wanted to learn how to make them. These look lovely! Thanks for the recipe.
Zen says
Thanks! So glad u like them! Do try the recipe it's super easy!
nancy says
one of my fav Chinese snacks
Zen says
Mine too! 🙂
Dawn Conklin says
These Chinese peanut butter cookies are so delicious! It's the first time we have tried them. We will definitely be making these again, the family loved them.
Zen says
Thank you Dawn, what a lovely thing to say. Thanks for taking the time to comment!
Samantha Ferraro says
Delicious! Thank you for introducing these cookies to me!
Zen says
I'm glad you like them Samantha, do let me know if you try them! 🙂 They're SUPER easy to make
Dorene cheo says
It is very crunchy
Zen says
yum! I love crunchy foods!