Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
Thick cookies with crisp edges and a soft centre, made with browned butter and chopped dark chocolate.
Browning the butter is ten minutes of work for a flavour you cannot get any other way: toffee and toasted nuts, sitting under the chocolate. The other change worth making is chopping a bar instead of using chips, so you get shards and puddles rather than uniform dots. Chilling the dough is not optional if you want thick cookies.
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How to make Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
Quantities scale automatically. Cooking times stay the same.
Dough
Chocolate and finishing
Equipment
- Light-coloured saucepan
- Electric whisk or stand mixer
- Two baking sheets
- Ice cream scoop, optional
Method
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1
Brown the butter
Melt the butter in a light-coloured pan over medium heat, then keep cooking it, swirling often, for 5 to 7 minutes. It will foam, quieten, and then the milk solids at the bottom will turn golden brown and smell nutty. Pour it at once into a bowl, brown bits and all.
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2
Cool it down
Leave the butter 15 minutes, until it is warm rather than hot. Hot butter cooks the egg and the cookies spread flat.
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3
Beat in the sugars
Whisk both sugars into the butter for a full minute, until the mixture looks like wet sand and is no longer grainy at the edges.
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4
Add the eggs and vanilla
Beat in the egg, the extra yolk and the vanilla for 1 to 2 minutes, until the mixture turns slightly paler and thickens enough to ribbon off the whisk.
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5
Fold in the dry ingredients
Add the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt and fold with a spatula until a few floury streaks remain, then add the chopped chocolate and fold just until it is distributed. Stop there; worked dough bakes tough.
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6
Chill the dough
Scoop into 18 balls of about 60 g, cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or overnight. This firms the fat so the cookies rise before they spread, and it lets the flour hydrate, which deepens the flavour.
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7
Bake
Heat the oven to 190C / 375F. Bake 6 cookies per sheet, well spaced, for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and golden and the centres still look underdone and puffy.
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8
Settle and salt
Sprinkle with flaky salt as they come out and leave them on the hot sheet for 5 minutes to finish setting, then move them to a rack. They collapse slightly into the right texture as they cool.
Cook’s tips
- Weigh the dough balls if you can. Even cookies bake evenly, and 60 g is the size that gives a crisp edge with a soft middle.
- Pull them while the centres look wet. A cookie that looks done in the oven is a hard cookie on the plate.
- If they spread too much, the butter was too warm or the dough was not chilled long enough. Put the next tray back in the fridge for 20 minutes.
Variations
- Add 100 g of toasted chopped walnuts or pecans with the chocolate.
- Swap a third of the dark chocolate for milk or white chocolate for a sweeter cookie.
- Press a few extra chocolate pieces onto the tops before baking for bakery-style puddles on the surface.
Storage and make-ahead
Keep in an airtight tin for 4 days, with a slice of bread in the tin to hold the softness. Raw dough balls freeze for 3 months and bake straight from frozen with 2 extra minutes, which is the reason to make the full batch.
Nutrition per serving
| Calories | 284 kcal |
|---|---|
| Protein | 3 g |
| Carbohydrates | 34 g |
| Fat | 16 g |
| Fibre | 2 g |
| Sugar | 22 g |
| Sodium | 180 mg |
Nutrition is estimated from ingredient averages and will vary with brands and portioning.
