If you’re a cookie lover searching for healthier cookie options, you’ll love these banana oatmeal cookies. Think of them as a mashup of banana bread with our regular oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. However you think of them, they’re a delicious cookie with a fantastic texture and lots of healthy fiber. It’s hard to go wrong with that combination.
The recipe takes just 10 minutes to mix, and from there the baking time will be limited only by the size of your ovens and cookie pans. You may never throw away another overripe banana.
Ingredients for Banana Oatmeal Cookies
- Flour: It’s the flour in a recipe that turns everything else from a simple bowl of ingredients (a pudding at best) into a cake, or in this case cookies. The flour provides the structure that holds everything else together.
- Sugar: The sugar in a cookie acts as a sweetener, but it also plays a role in giving the cookies their finished texture (it’s kitchen chemistry).
- Baking soda: The baking soda reacts with the mild acidity of the bananas to leaven the cookies. It also helps with browning.
- Cinnamon and nutmeg: The cinnamon and nutmeg bring their characteristic warm flavors to the cookies, rounding out the sweet flavors of the bananas, oats and sugar.
- Butter: The butter brings richness to their flavor and combines with the sugar and flour to create their final texture.
- Egg: The eggs in a cookie like this one help the other ingredients blend together, and their proteins contribute to the cookies’ structure and nutritional value.
- Banana: Bananas are an interesting fruit to bake with, because they combine sweetness, fiber and moisture. In this case they also furnish the acidity to make the baking soda work, as well as add their distinctive flavor.
- Quick-cooking oats: The oats bring a textural contrast, provide it with a pleasant “chew” and also help moderate the sweetness.
- Chocolate chips: Chocolate plays nicely with bananas in many desserts, including banana bread or banana muffins, and they reprise that role here.
- Chopped walnuts: Not everyone loves them, but chopped walnuts pack a distinctive flavor and hint of astringency that work well with the sweetness of both chocolate and bananas.
Directions
Step 1: Mix the cookie dough
Heat your oven to 375°F. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, soda and spices. Beat in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add the egg, bananas and oats, and mix them well to form the cookie dough. Stir in the chocolate chips and walnuts.
Step 2: Bake the cookies
Drop the cookie dough onto greased baking sheets by the tablespoon, leaving room for them to spread. Bake the cookies for 13 to 15 minutes, or until they’re golden brown. Cool the cookies on wire racks when they’re done.
Banana Oatmeal Cookie Recipe Variations
- Swap out the walnuts: Walnuts are frequently paired with bananas and chocolate, but they’re far from the only option. Almonds, hazelnuts or even rich macadamias are all good choices in these oatmeal banana cookies. The best sap of all may be pecans, which are as close to a 1:1 substitution for walnuts as you can get, but are still a decided upgrade. They definitely play just as well with bananas, as anyone who’s baked our creamy banana pecan pie or contest-winning roasted banana and pecan cheesecake can tell you.
- Brown the butter: This is a real professional’s trick for dialing up the flavor in a cookie recipe. Instead of using your butter straight from the package, brown it first and then let it cool until it’s solid again. Browning butter gives it hints of butterscotch and caramel, as well as a nutty flavor that complements the bananas and walnuts beautifully.
- Make bar cookies: Instead of dropping the cookie dough in balls on a sheet, bake the whole batch in a parchment-lined 13X9-inch cake pan or a deep-rimmed quarter-sheet cookie pan. Once the pan of cookies has baked and cooled, top it with your favorite chocolate glaze and then sprinkle the glaze with more nuts (and if you really want to go next-level, a drizzle of caramel as well).
How to Store Banana Oatmeal Cookies
This banana oatmeal cookie recipe is like most other cookies where storage is concerned. Your best bet is to keep them in a food safe container with a tight-fitting lid, either the kind you’d use for leftovers or a classic-style cookie tin. Old-school cookie jars look pretty on your counter, but they aren’t airtight and are better for serving than storage (though there are modern cookie storage container versions that work a lot better).
How long will banana oatmeal cookies keep?
As long as you let them cool completely before you packed them up, and your storage container is airtight, they should last up to a week before they start to taste stale. You can lose a day or two of that time if someone in the household doesn’t reliably put the lid back on after removing a cookie.
Can I freeze banana oatmeal cookies?
You bet! Drop cookies will keep for up to 6 months in the freezer if they’re wrapped well enough. Your best bet is to freeze the cookies in a single layer on sheet pans first, and then transfer them to freezer bags or freezer-safe containers for long-term storage. They’re less likely to stick together or be damaged in the freezer, that way. If you stack them into their container in multiple layers, put a sheet of parchment or wax paper between each layer to help keep them separate.
Banana Oatmeal Cookies Recipe Tips
How can I get my cookies to be more consistent in size?
The recipe calls for dropping cookies by the tablespoon onto a sheet pan, but tablespoons meant for measuring don’t scoop well and the larger spoons in your silverware drawer aren’t really tablespoons in size. Your best bet for consistency, speed and convenience is a cookie scoop, or “disher” as chefs call them. You can order them online or find them at restaurant-supply stores, and they come in a variety of sizes. The one you want for 1 tablespoon of dough at a time is a #70 disher (70 scoops to the quart).
How ripe do the bananas need to be?
The short answer is “ripe enough to mash easily.” A longer answer is that they riper the bananas are, the better your cookies will be. Overripe bananas, the kind you save for your banana bread, have a stronger banana flavor and they’ll also react more strongly with the baking soda. The only downside is that if they’re really overripe, they may darken the cookies’ appearance slightly. Never throw away your overripe bananas, by the way. Freeze them, and use them in any of our hundreds of banana recipes that call for dead-ripe or overripe bananas.
Can these be made gluten-free?
A lot of viral gluten-free (or keto) recipes on social media used mashed bananas as their base, and no flour at all. This isn’t that kind of recipe, but it can be made gluten-free easily enough. Switch out the all purpose flour for your favorite “1:1” all purpose gluten-free flour, and be sure to buy oats that are certified gluten-free (they have no gluten of their own, but can be contaminated during the milling process). Chocolate chips may have trace quantities of gluten, so if you’re especially sensitive you should seek out a brand that’s explicitly certified gluten-free.
