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.
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 when you want cookies. Just make sure you keep an eye on the butter –you can definitely go too far and have blackish in your browned butter.
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.
Why these chocolate chip cookies work
Aside from the brown butter, I’d say I have a moderate amount of flour (the amount of flour is what determines if you have a thin or thick cookie) to a very specific amount of brown vs. white sugar. The amount of brown sugar is 3 times the amount of the white.
According to the wisdom of the internet, cookies with more brown sugar up tall and moist, while cookies with more white sugar end up thin and crisp.
What kind of chocolate for chocolate chip cookies
Of course you can’t talk about chocolate chip cookies without talking about the chocolate. Chopped chocolate is key to these cookies. a chunk of semi sweet dark chocolate and chop it yourself.
You want that mix of large chunks and thin chocolate shavings to distribute themselves through the cookies so you have barely there of chocolate in the dough to give the cookie a more chocolatey flavor and large chunks to melt into gooey pools. Eight ounces seems like the perfect amount of chocolate. You might feel like there’s not enough dough to take all the chocolate, but trust me, there is.
Ingredients
- 1.5 cup all purpose flour 200g
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup butter plus 1-2 tbsp extra,
- 3/4 cup brown sugar 150g
- 1/4 cup sugar 50g
- 1 large egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 cup chopped semi sweet dark chocolate about 8oz
- flaky sea salt to finish
Instructions
Whisk together the flour, salt and baking soda in a bowl and set aside.
Brown 1/2 cup butter in a saucepan, swirling, until butter foams and starts to turn brown and smells nutty. Transfer butter to a liquid measuring cup and see how much water content you lost. You want to have 1/2 cup of butter, so stir in the remaining 1-2 tablespoons of butter if you need it – the butter you add in should melt slowly and not foam up.
When the butter is melted and slightly cool, whisk in both sugars until incorporated with no lumps. Whisk in the egg until smooth and glossy. Stir in the vanilla and use a rubber spatula to fold in the dry ingredients until no dry spots remain. Fold in the chocolate.
Use a 1.5 tablespoon cookie scoop and scoop out two balls of dough, so that each cookie is 3 tablespoons large. Smoosh the two balls on top of each other – they should kind of look like a log and you should get about 14-16 cookies depending on how big your chocolate chunks are. Place the logs on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet, cover with plastic wrap and let chill in the fridge for 15-30 minutes, or as long as it takes for your oven for baked it.
Easy paper tulip
