the best brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe
One of my favorite things to do is to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies, portion out the dough into individual saran-wrapped balls, and stick them in the freezer so I can have a fresh cookie on demand. I’ve perfected my ideal chocolate chip cookie. And I wanted to share the recipe with you all :)
Recently, my friend hosted a blind cookie tasting where each of us had to bring or buy a cookie, and the cookie I made using this recipe won, even against cookies from famous San Francisco bakeries!
the cookie
the background story
Before we get into the recipe, let me share a bit of backstory on how I came to search for a great chocolate chip cookie recipe! It actually started a few years ago when I was living in NYC and just started dating my now husband. Prior to dating him, I wasn’t really a cookie girl, but whenever we would go around NYC, he would always buy a cookie here or there, and slowly I found myself starting to appreciate the high-end fancy $5-7 cookies around town. I then started my own mission to try to find my favorite chocolate chip cookie in the city, which led me to some hits like Lysée (their milk chocolate-banana caramel cookie may just be my absolute most favorite cookie ever?!), Culture Espresso, Seven Grams, and of course, the classic Levain Bakery.
After moving across the bridge to Brooklyn, I was slightly further away from my favorite cookie spots, but I decided to start making my own. After trial and erroring a bunch of popular cookie recipes, I found my favorite ratios which is adapted from Butternut Bakery’s Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe. Here’s a fun video where this creator actually tests a bunch of popular chocolate chip cookie recipes on the internet, including the one I like.
The key to a great chocolate chip cookie recipe is: BROWN BUTTER! Adding brown butter to anything is such a hack because it adds such a lovely toasty toffee aroma and depth to any recipe. The main change I made to the original recipe is lower the sugar ratios. I still find that it produces a slightly less cloyingly sweet cookie, but still has structural integrity and good texture!
the recipe
Makes one dozen cookies
ingredients
I’ve converted all of the ingredients to grams because measuring everything with a kitchen scale is the easiest way to create a consistent end product every time.
wet ingredients
220 g salted European butter, browned
80 g brown sugar
100 g white sugar
1 whole egg + 1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 teaspoons vanilla paste
dry ingredients
228 g all-purpose flour
3.6 g baking powder
8 g cornstarch
4 g baking soda
3 g salt
chocolate
130 g dark chocolate
70 g milk chocolate
instructions
You will need a small pot for browning the butter, a large mixing bowl for the dry ingredients, and a small mixing bowl for the wet ingredients.
I’ve written out my process below in the chronological order in which I like to do everything. There are three basic components: the wet ingredients, the dry ingredients, and the chocolate.
For the chocolate, always use a good-quality chocolate bar rather than chocolate chips, and chop it yourself. You can find large chocolate bars specifically intended for baking. I usually get mine from Trader Joe’s.
Brown the butter. Set it aside to cool until it is slightly warmer than room temperature. If it is too hot, it may melt the sugar when you combine the wet ingredients. If you’ve never browned butter before, look up a quick YouTube tutorial!
While the butter is cooling, prepare the wet and dry ingredients.
Measure the brown and white sugars into the small mixing bowl. Set them aside while you measure the dry ingredients.
Measure the flour, baking powder, cornstarch, baking soda, and salt into the large mixing bowl. Stir to combine.
Return to the butter. Pour the cooled brown butter into the small mixing bowl and stir it together with the sugars. I like to use a fork for this step.
Make a well in the butter-and-sugar mixture and add the whole egg and egg yolk. Set the extra egg white aside for another dish! Whisk the egg and yolk in the center, then stir everything together until combined.
Add the lemon juice and vanilla paste to the small mixing bowl and stir to combine.
Chop the chocolate bars into slivers and bite-sized chunks. Reserve a handful of the larger chunks to press into the cookie dough balls at the end. This creates a nice, large pocket of chocolate in the center when the cookies bake.
Now it’s finally time to combine everything! Pour the wet ingredients from the small mixing bowl into the large mixing bowl while stirring gently. Fold gently until combined. The dough will be quite sticky.
Add the chopped chocolate and fold it into the dough. This can be a little difficult, so I like to add the chocolate in batches to make it easier to distribute evenly.
Measure out 2-ounce balls of dough and press one large chocolate chunk into each one. I then wrap each cookie dough ball individually in plastic wrap and place all of the balls in a freezer-safe zip-top bag.
Let the dough rest in the refrigerator overnight. After that, your cookies are ready to bake or go straight into the freezer for on-demand deliciousness!
To bake, preheat the oven to 400°F and bake the cookies for approximately 12 minutes. Right after the cookies come out of the oven, hit them with a generous pinch of flaky salt.
the blind cookie tasting
