As much as the peanut butter cookie is an American classic, it too often is predictably one-note sweet and lopsidedly peanutty. Which is why Casey Wall, co-owner of Falco Bakery in Melbourne, Australia, sought a way to balance the treat. He suspected a straight-up peanut butter cookie might be a hard sell to an Australian audience with little appetite for the star ingredient.

His unexpected solution: salty-savory miso. “It combats the sweetness of a normal peanut butter cookie and heightens the nuttiness” without letting it overwhelm, says Wall.

Add a chewy-crispy texture thanks to a trick not common to baking—deflating the half-baked cookies by tapping the baking sheet on the counter before finishing them—and Wall had a winner.

Recreating the recipe at Milk Street was simple, though we switched from raw sugar to brown sugar to produce a chewier cookie, and opted for easier-to-find white miso instead of Wall’s brown rice miso. The result? A savory but balanced classic.