Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

These chocolate chip cookies are butter-ly amazing!

cookieplate

Why these are the best chocolate chip cookies

The caramelization of the combination of the two sugars, the nuttiness of the browned butter, the immense amount of pools of melted chocolate…swoon. It has slightly crisp buttery edges with a hint of toffee and a soft, dense and chewy center barely held together because of all the chocolate. The tops are craggy with those ever instagramable ripples and it’s just the perfect balance between sweet and salty. This cookie makes my heart beat a little faster. Cue the heavy breathing. SO GOOD.


The recipe is an amalgamation of all the cookies that have come before it. It stands of the shoulders of giants. In honor of all the cookies I’ve loved before, this is it: my best salted brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe.


For the best chocolate chip cookies, use brown butter

Browned butter in chocolate chip cookies is definitely a thing and I happen to like the little hint of hazelnut nuttiness it adds, but only if you brown the butter just enough. Plus, there’s the bonus of not having to wait for your butter to come to room temperature when you want cookies. Just make sure you keep an eye on the butter –you can definitely go too far and have blackish bits in your browned butter, which are a big no for me.


I like to brown just to the point where there are little flecks of brown. Of course, when you brown butter, you lose moisture, so that moisture is added back in with an extra pat or two of butter after the butter is browned. The extra pat of butter helps cool down the butter too, which is awesome because you don’t want your cookie dough too warm which will cause them to spread.


What is brown butter?

Brown butter, also known as beurre noisette (hazelnut butter in French), is an out of the world delicious concoction originally used in savory French foods but is now used everywhere butter is used. It’s deeply golden, flecked with brown bits, nutty, and incredibly aromatic. Brown butter is perfection.


Browned butter brings so much flavor to baked goods for just a tiny bit of extra effort. It’ll add a nutty caramel roundness and highlight the brown sugar making these chocolate chip cookies taste caramelized, deep, rich, and intense.


meltedbutter

How to brown butter

Brown butter is made by melting unsalted butter over very low heat, allowing it to separate into butter fat and milk solids. The milk solids fall to the bottom of the pan where they start to brown until they reach the color of hazelnuts.
Here’s a step by step!


1. Warm: start your butter, cut in in small pieces in a cold pan and warm it slowly so that it melts evenly.


2. Sputter: once the butter has melted, it will start to bubble and foam as the water is cooked off and the fat left begins to sputter. The butter will still be yellow. Stir gently and turn down the heat if it starts to splatter too much.


3. Foamy: the butter will foam and the foam will change from pale to very yellow as the water is cooked off and you’re left with the milk solids, which you should see floating near the bottom of the pan.


4. Brown: the butter will start to look deeply yellow and start to become golden and brown. The milk solids will become even more visible and your place will smell amazingly toasty, nutty, and caramel-y.


5. Remove: Once your brown butter is to your liking, take it off the heat and pour it out into a liquid measuring cup as the milk solids will continue to toast in the residual heat.


6. Bonus step: for these cookies, we need to add the water content that cooked out of the butter. Check the measurement on the butter and add in small pieces of room-temp butter until you get 1/2 cup of liquid brown butter.

Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies


Ingredients

Instructions

1. Whisk together the flour, salt and baking soda in a bowl and set aside.

flour

2. Brown 1/2 cup butter in a saucepan, swirling, until butter foams and starts to turn brown and smells nutty. Transfer butter to a liquid measuring cup and see how much water content you lost. You want to have 1/2 cup of butter, so stir in the remaining 1-2 tablespoons of butter if you need it – the butter you add in should melt slowly and not foam up.

meltedbutter

3. When the butter is melted and slightly cool, whisk in both sugars until incorporated with no lumps. Whisk in the egg until smooth and glossy. Stir in the vanilla and use a rubber spatula to fold in the dry ingredients until no dry spots remain. Fold in the chocolate.

cookiedough

4. Use a 1.5 tablespoon cookie scoop and scoop out two balls of dough, so that each cookie is 3 tablespoons large. Smoosh the two balls on top of each other – they should kind of look like a log and you should get about 14-16 cookies depending on how big your chocolate chunks are. Place the logs on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet, cover with plastic wrap and let chill in the fridge for 15-30 minutes, or as long as it takes for your oven to heat up.

doughballs

5. Arrange the racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven and heat to 375°F. Space out the cookie logs (standing tall) on parchment paper lined rimmed baking sheets, leaving plenty of space in between. Bake, rotating and moving trays halfway if browning unevenly. Bake until golden brown and firm around the edges, 10-12 minutes.

cookieplatter

6. Remove from the oven and bang the pan down against the counter top (this helps create a couple of ripples like you see on Instagram). Sprinkle with flaky sea salt, let cool on the baking sheets and enjoy!

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