Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies Recipe

The Chocolate Chunk Cookie We Keep Coming Back To

Browning the butter first is the one move that separates this cookie from a standard chocolate chip cookie. Cooking it past melted and into deep amber territory concentrates the milk solids into something toasty and almost butterscotch-like, and that flavor carries through every bite once the dough goes into the oven. Combined with a generous amount of roughly chopped bittersweet chocolate and a long rest in the fridge, this Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies recipe reads like the grown-up version of the cookie you grew up with, crisp at the edges, chewy in the middle, and never one-note sweet. Part of our recipe collection.

Why It Works

• Browning the butter before mixing trades a flat, buttery flavor for a nutty, caramelized one. It takes an extra five minutes and changes the entire cookie.
• Using two sugars, more brown than white, keeps the crumb moist and chewy instead of dry and snappy, and adds a faint molasses note that plays well with the browned butter.
• Roughly chopped chocolate, rather than chips, melts unevenly on purpose. Some bites hit a thin shard of chocolate, others hit a full pool of it.
• Chilling the dough for at least 45 minutes, ideally overnight, lets the flour fully hydrate and the fat firm up, which is what keeps these cookies thick instead of thin and greasy.

On Browning the Butter

Melt the butter over medium heat and keep stirring once it starts to foam. The color will move quickly from pale yellow to gold to a deep amber, and the smell will shift from plain melted butter to something closer to toasted hazelnuts. That smell is the real signal, more reliable than color alone since it is easy to misjudge in a hot pan. Pull it off the heat the moment you smell it, since the residual heat in the pan keeps cooking the milk solids for a few more seconds.

Don't Skip the Chill

It is tempting to bake the dough right away, especially with that smell of brown butter in the kitchen. Resist it. An overnight rest in the fridge firms up the butter enough that the cookies hold their shape and bake up thick, with that classic crackled top instead of spreading thin. If you are short on time, 45 minutes is the minimum, but the difference between 45 minutes and overnight is noticeable.