Chewy Gluten-Free Banana Oatmeal Cookies Recipe

My husband mentioned seeing a post about strawberry Oatmeal cookies. That sounded awesome to me, so I started working on a recipe to make something like that.

At the same time, we had some bananas that were extremely ripe, and begging to be baked into something. Banana bread sounded really good, but I’d already had my mind set on cookies.

… So I split the difference, and now we have a tasty recipe for gluten-free banana oatmeal cookies!

That was almost 3 years ago now, and these oatmeal banana cookies are still a big favourite.

As with all of my gluten-free cookies, these have a fantastic texture – soft and chewy, hearty texture of classic oatmeal cookies, with the taste of banana throughout.

Seriously, it’s a good thing that this easy oatmeal cookies makes a fair number of them, because my (NOT gluten-free!) husband can *not* stay out of them!

The thing is, I’m not a big fan of the “gluten-free cookies are punishment” thing, which is why I use a blend of flours specific to each recipe.

The textures and flavours work together to make a fantastic cookie – and those particular flavours work really, REALLY well with the bananas and oats.

It’s a really great recipe for a relatively healthy cookie… and the perfect way to use up old bananas.

Enjoy!

Ingredients

This chewy banana oatmeal cookies recipe uses fairly basic ingredients, most – or all – of which should be easy to find in any larger grocery store.

A complete list of ingredients with measurements is in the recipe card at the end of this post, but I have some notes for you, before getting to the recipe!

Overripe Bananas

Much like with my Gluten Free Banana Muffins and my
Gluten Free Banana Bread recipe, you’re going to want to use bananas that … don’t look great.

Wait until your banana peels are covered with brown spots, and are fairly mushy – just not rotten.

Super ripe bananas are the key to getting a really robust banana flavor in these healthy banana oat cookies.

Rolled Oats

This recipe uses Rolled Oats, which can also be labeled as old fashioned rolls oats, or even just old-fashioned oats

Two things to note here:

1. Be sure to use certified gluten free oats if you are serving these to anyone who needs to avoid gluten for any reason.

Oats themselves are gluten free, but they’re also HIGHLY likely to be cross-contaminated with wheat, if it’s not certified that they’re NOT.

2. Steel-cut oats, and any form of quick oats – AKA quick cooking oats or instant oats – aren’t going to work the same way in this recipe, as they all behave differently.

Stick to Gluten Free Rolled Oats!

The Flour Mixture

As always, I use a blend of a few basic gluten free flours – specific to each recipe – rather than an all-purpose mix.

This gives me the best control over the finished flavour, texture, and performance, and it makes for a far more consistent result.

The gluten free “all purpose” flour mixtures all have different compositions, and will handle things like moisture uptake/retention, browning, etc differently.

This healthy banana oatmeal cookies recipe uses my basic set of “sweet” flours, that I use in most of my baked goods:

Sorghum Flour
Light Buckwheat Flour
Coconut Flour
Xanthan Gum

I have these flours on hand at all times, they really do make for the absolute best sweet baked goods – cookies, muffins, quick breads, etc – when it comes to gluten free baking.

And hey – they tend to be cheaper than the gluten free all purpose flours, too!

The Fats

This recipe uses both unsalted butter and lard, as it gives the best balance in flavor and texture.

That said, feel free to use all butter if you want – it’ll just end up a bit crispier than if you use part lard.

Alternately, you can swap the lard out for vegetable shortening, if you need to keep these chewy oatmeal cookies vegetarian.

Variations

The recipe is great as it is, but there are a few variations of these banana oatmeal cookies you may want to consider:

Banana Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies: Swap the raisins out for chocolate chips – especially good with dark chocolate chips.. I’ll usually leave the spices out of the base recipe when doing chocolate chip banana oatmeal cookies.

Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal Cookies: Skip the butter, replace it with ⅔ cup smooth peanut butter. This works really well as peanut butter banana chocolate chip cookies!

Miscellaneous: Swap the Raisins out for different add-ins: sweetened dried cranberries, dried currants, or chopped up bits of other dried fruit, or nuts. Coconut shreds work well.

As pictured in this post, we swapped the raisins out for chopped walnuts.