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.

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.