The Kitchen · Desserts · Any
Brown Butter Choc Chip Cookies
Drink: a flat white, or cold milk, no shame if you lean sweet.
Browning the butter is ten extra minutes that changes the whole cookie. It smells like hazelnuts, it tastes like toffee, and it takes these from good to the ones people ask about.
Browning cooks the water out of the butter, which is why the flour in this recipe runs a little higher than a standard cookie. Trust the numbers.
Method
- Brown the butter in a light-coloured pan over medium heat, stirring, until the milk solids turn deep golden and it smells nutty. Pour it into your mixing bowl, scraping in every brown bit, and let it cool 15 minutes.
- Whisk both sugars into the warm butter, then the eggs and vanilla, and whisk until glossy and a shade lighter, about 1 minute.
- Fold in the flour, baking soda, and salt until just combined, then fold in the chocolate.
- Portion into balls of 55 to 60 g. Cover and rest the dough in the fridge, ideally overnight. The rest deepens the flavour and keeps them from spreading thin.
- Heat the oven to 175°C. Bake from the fridge, spaced well apart, for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly underdone.
- Hit them with flaky salt the moment they come out, and let them finish setting on the tray for 10 minutes.
Make it yours
- Half milk chocolate, half dark, if you like them sweeter.
- Toasted walnuts or pecans, about 100 g, folded in with the chocolate.
- Freeze the portioned balls and bake straight from frozen, adding a minute or two.
Between us
If you skip the overnight rest they are still very good. They are just not the ones people ask about.
These numbers came out of a lot of testing in my kitchen. Weigh the flour.
Enjoy your thyme.
While you cook
pull up a chair
When the season turns, I write you a letter.
One short note when the menu changes: what’s ripe, what I’m cooking, and a few things worth gathering people around. Nothing else.