Brown Butter Cookies - Easy Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe! (2024)

FAQs

Are chocolate chip cookies better with brown butter? ›

Yes, browned butter chocolate chip cookies are delicious! Browning the butter adds a rich and nutty flavor to the cookies, enhancing the overall taste and creating a more complex flavor profile.

Brown butter: the brown butter is what really makes them so unique. The flavor profile is nutty, sweet, toasty and reminiscent of a caramel hazelnut flavor. Sugar: instead of doing a half-and-half ratio of regular granulated white sugar and brown sugar, I do mostly brown sugar and only a bit of white sugar.

My Best Tips for Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies:

I always use a kitchen scale to weigh my ingredients, especially flour. Incorrectly measured flour can lead to cookies that are tough, crumbly, dry, too thick, or just blah. I also swear by using an oven thermometer to ensure baking accuracy.

Chocolate chip cookies have a lot of fat in them. When they hit your tongue, the emulsifiers in milk “help to smooth out the chocolate as you're eating it,” Hartings said.

“Browning all the butter removes the water content, but the dough still needs some of that water to come together. Browning only some of the butter is enough to achieve that signature nuttiness, while the remaining unbrowned butter provides enough water content for the dough to come together.”

Milk Solids Work Wonders For Brown Butter - Until They Burn

Those solids ultimately sink down and turn brown as they caramelize on the bottom of the pan. As this happens, it unlocks the nutty flavors brown butter is known for. But when the process goes too far, those same solids develop a burnt, acrid taste.

For example, if you are making chewy chocolate chip cookies, you might want to use melted butter that is at room temperature to achieve the mouth-watering, soft chewiness. If you are making crisp cookies, it is best to chill it a bit beforehand, which will help create a crunchy texture.

if you use melted butter when making cookies and you cook them right after mixing, the cookies will spread out a bit more than if you use softened butter. The difference goes away if you refrigerate the dough before baking.

Regarding the extra acidity of dark brown sugar, acid activates baking soda, so if you use dark brown sugar to make, say, cookies, your cookies will rise higher, but only slightly.

If you love the taste of butter but hate to miss out on creaming your butter and sugar together in recipes, you can have the best of both words. Yes, yes we can. Simply chill your butter after browning it and it will return to a solid state and then proceed with the recipe as instructed.

What is the secret ingredient to keep cookies soft? ›

Light corn syrup is another ingredient that you can add to cookie dough that will help it stay softer longer. The corn syrup you buy at the grocery store is not the high-fructose corn syrup that soft drinks are made with; it's a sugar that is liquid at room temperature and helps other sugars say liquid at high heat.

Flour adds fluff and texture to the cookies. Adding too little flour can cause cookies to be flat, greasy, and crispy. Most recipes assume you'll use all-purpose, but if you want a lighter, crumblier cookie texture, choose one with a lower protein content such as cake-and-pastry flour.

“For the best results, choose a silicone baking mat or parchment paper to line your pan,” Dawn recommends. “Simply greasing your pan — basically adding fat to it — will encourage your cookies to spread.” (Check out our side-by-side test baking to see for yourself.)

The best butter for your baked goods depends on what type of recipe you're whipping up. Unsalted, American-style butter works well in goods like cookies, pound cakes and pancakes that require the high-fat content of conventional butter and more flexibility with salt and flavor content.

Baking recipes typically call for unsalted butter because the amount of salt in salted butter varies depending on the brand – there is no “industry standard.” For example, if you use one brand of salted butter in a recipe, and we use another, our baked goods could end up tasting very different from one other.

Unsalted butter gives you complete control of the overall flavor of your recipe. This is especially important in certain baked goods where the pure, sweet cream flavor of butter is key (butter cookies or pound cakes). As it pertains to cooking, unsalted butter lets the real, natural flavor of your foods come through.

The caramelized butter, sugar, vanilla, chocolate, and subtle notes of salt offer a balanced flavor profile. The saltiness highlights and enhances the preexisting flavors. But what makes for the perfect chocolate chip cookie? You get what you pay for, and high-quality ingredients equate to a high-quality product.