This Salted Peanut Butter Pie Is All About the Fudgy 3-Ingredient Filling

A Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. Psst—we don't count water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (specifically, 1/2 cup or less of olive oil, vegetable oil, and butter), since we're guessing you have those covered. Today, we’re taking an iconic three-ingredient cookie, and turning it into pie.

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The first pie I ever mastered was peanut butter, sometime in high school. The recipe was from a cookbook called Sweety Pies and most of its ingredients were always in our pantry: chunky peanut butter, vanilla extract, salt, butter, eggs, corn syrup, sugar. I made it for birthdays and celebrations and just because.

Many peanut butter pie fillings are fluffy and creamy, like mousse. But my first-love pie wasn’t like that. It was thick, fudgy, and dense, like a really great blondie. I baked it in an all-butter crust (by no means flaky, but I tried my best) and cut-out pastry hearts and scattered them on top.

Fast-forward to today and I make all sorts of pies. For a few years, I even made pie for a living. I love lemon pie and pecan pie and coconut pie. In fact, I found so many new pies to love, I forgot all about my highschool sweetheart.

Until I made Ovenly’s three-ingredient peanut butter cookies.

Admittedly, I was about four years late to the party. Ovenly has been an NYC favorite since 2010. Owners Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin published the bakery’s namesake cookbook in 2014, which included the recipe for their fan-favorite peanut butter cookies (“inspired by our friend Emmy Tiderington”). And Deb Perelman raved about the recipe on her blog Smitten Kitchen in 2015.

Ever since, more than a few people have told me that it’s the end-all peanut butter cookie. The hook? All you need is creamy peanut butter, brown sugar, eggs, a splash of vanilla, and some flaky salt on top. Oh, and a bowl and a spoon. No special equipment. No flour.

When I first baked them, I thought the same thing as everyone else: This is the best peanut butter cookie I’ve ever had. And then I thought about the peanut butter pie I couldn’t stop making as a teenager. And then I thought: What if this cookie somehow became that pie?

While Ovenly’s peanut butter cookie was an aha moment for me, it wasn’t the first of its kind. In BakeWise, Shirley Corriher has a recipe for “E-Z Delicious Peanut Butter Cookies.” Like Ovenly's, they’re made with creamy peanut butter, brown sugar, and egg. (Unlike Ovenly's, they also add in English toffee bits for good measure.)

Corriher based her recipe on the “Impossible Peanut Butter Cookies” from The Family Baker by Susan G. Purdy, published in 1999. These, too, have three ingredients: creamy peanut butter, sugar, and egg—though notably, the sugar here is granulated, not brown.

And though the ingredients are more or less the same, each recipe has its own ratios. Ovenly’s uses less peanut butter and sugar than the other two. Purdy’s “Impossible” cookies use the most sugar of all.

Which gets me back to this pie. I thought it would be as easy as dumping Ovenly’s cookie dough into a pie crust and calling it a day. But it ended up being way more complicated (and took way more pies than I care to admit). The winner was Corriher’s dough sans the toffee bits, and turned out as delicious as the pie of my childhood only with way fewer ingredients.

And about that crust: I went with an ultra-buttery, extra-thick Ritz cracker one. Partly to avoid par-baking a classic pie crust, but mostly because Ritz crackers and peanut butter go so well together.

The pièce de résistance is that final flourish of flaky sea salt. I wouldn’t have sprinkled it on those early peanut butter pies, but I know better now.

Have you ever made flourless peanut butter cookies before? Discuss in the comments!