Forget this guide because their control recipe is less than perfect. This recipe is perfect. Fight me. I didn’t perfect it, America’s Test Kitchen did. Kudos to them.
I call this recipe perfect, not only because it makes the exact kind of cookie I crave, but because it can go from stored ingredients to finished cookie in the time it takes to prepare (without the hassle of softening butter) and it will make your house smell heavenly the entire time.
Buy good (and fresh) ingredients, you can’t make perfect cookies with rubbish ingredients.
Perfect Browned Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
INGREDIENTS
- 1-3/4 cups (210g) unbleached all-purpose flour
- 1/2 (3g) teaspoon baking soda
- 14 tablespoons (197g) unsalted butter
- 1/2 cup (99g) granulated sugar
- 3/4 cups (160g) packed dark brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon (9g) table salt
- 2 teaspoons (11.2g) vanilla extract
- 1 large egg
- 1 large egg yolk
- 1-1/4 cups (296mL) semisweet chocolate chips
- 3/4 cup (177mL) chopped pecans or chopped toasted walnuts (optional)
PREPARATION Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 large (18- by 12-inch) baking sheets with parchment paper. Whisk flour and baking soda together in medium bowl; set aside.
Heat 10 tablespoons (140g) butter in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat until melted, about 2 minutes. Continue cooking, swirling pan constantly until butter is dark golden brown and has nutty aroma, 1 to 3 minutes. Remove skillet from heat and, using heatproof spatula, transfer browned butter to large heatproof bowl.
Stir remaining 4 tablespoons butter into hot butter until completely melted. Add both sugars, salt, and vanilla to bowl with butter and whisk until fully incorporated. Add egg and yolk and whisk until mixture is smooth with no sugar lumps remaining, about 30 seconds. Let mixture stand 3 minutes, then whisk for 30 seconds. Repeat process of resting and whisking 2 more times until mixture is thick, smooth, and shiny. Using rubber spatula or wooden spoon, stir in flour mixture until just combined, about 1 minute. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts (if using), giving dough final stir to ensure no flour pockets remain.
Divide dough into 16 portions, each about 3 tablespoons (or use #24 cookie scoop). Arrange 2 inches apart on prepared baking sheets, 8 dough balls per sheet. (Smaller baking sheets can be used, but will require 3 batches.)
Bake cookies 1 tray at a time until cookies the edges have begun to set but centers are still soft, 10 to 14 minutes, rotating baking sheet halfway through baking.
Transfer baking sheet to wire rack; cool cookies completely before serving.
Give these cookies away. Seriously, they are too delicious. Your waistline and your neighbors will thank you. Just don’t give any cookies to the ignorant fucks whining about units. They got the conversion all wrong anyway.
I hear that people like US recipes because they don’t use exact metrics and instead use spoons and cups and those are supposedly easier to scale. In baking I absolutely hate that. Give me metric units. I have no problems scaling those up or down as required. What’s a cup? I have .2 liter cups and .4 liter. How the fuck is that supposed to be easier? And what’s up with tablespoons of butter? Depending on how much you put on a spoon that can easily mean double/half as much butter. With grams and liters there is no doubt and no second-guessing.
A cup in US Customary is 237 ml (often rounded to 240 ml). Americans don’t exist in a world where they have to play “is this cup US Customary or different measure also calling itself a cup measure?” as all their measuring cups are going to be in US Customary. Butter usually comes in quarter pound sticks with teaspoon (4.9 ml) and tablespoon (14.8 ml) measures printed on the wrapper so you can just cut a hunk of the appropriate volume from the stick and if you were using a measuring spoon to measure butter you’d use a level measure to create consistency and not just let it heap up.
Note: I prefer weighing ingredients and in metric at that. I’m just answering your questions.
Cool, thank you! How much would be a tablespoon of butter in grams? Like 25g or 50g?
1 tablespoon of butter is ~14 g. For a more complete conversion (with respect to butter): 1 stick = 0.5 cup = 8 tablespoons = 24 teaspoons = 113 g.
Thank you again!
You’re welcome. A nice resource for a bunch of other ingredients for baking is this one from King Arthur Flour.
Weighing ingredients is so much better. I can cook significantly faster when I don’t have to measure volumetrically, plus recipes scale so much more easily. If I want to make 3.134 of a recipe, weight is the way to go.
Oh, I agree. If I use a recipe regularly I’ll often convert it or if I’m creating one from scratch I’ll usually just have everything by weight from get go.
P.S. Nothing makes me annoyed at a recipe faster than seeing something like 2.5 cups of chopped broccoli.
This is very close to the “perfect” recipe I use from Tasty. But they add in a little bit of espresso powder. It’s not enough to make the cookies taste like coffee, but it does make the chocolate flavor more intense. I really like this recipe, but now I want to try the ATK recipe and see which one is better because I swear by the Tasty recipe ever since I found it. Here it is if anyone’s curious: https://tasty.co/recipe/tasty-101-ultimate-brown-butter-chocolate-chip-cookies
Edit: I am actually not sure about the amount of butter. Another table I found would give the amount as about 400g, which is insane. That would make this just butter with sugar and some stuff to keep it all together. But on the other hand that does sound very American.
The recipe translated for the mentally sane:
Perfect Browned Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
INGREDIENTS
~150g unbleached all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 200g unsalted butter 100g granulated sugar 150g packed dark brown sugar 1 teaspoon table salt 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 1 large egg 1 large egg yolk 100g semisweet chocolate chips 100g chopped pecans or chopped toasted walnuts (optional)PREPARATION Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 190 degrees. Line 2 large (30-45cm) baking sheets with parchment paper. Whisk flour and baking soda together in medium bowl; set aside.
Heat 150g butter in 25cm skillet over medium-high heat until melted, about 2 minutes. Continue cooking, swirling pan constantly until butter is dark golden brown and has nutty aroma, 1 to 3 minutes. Remove skillet from heat and, using heatproof spatula, transfer browned butter to large heatproof bowl.
Stir remaining 50g butter into hot butter until completely melted. Add both sugars, salt, and vanilla to bowl with butter and whisk until fully incorporated. Add egg and yolk and whisk until mixture is smooth with no sugar lumps remaining, about 30 seconds. Let mixture stand 3 minutes, then whisk for 30 seconds. Repeat process of resting and whisking 2 more times until mixture is thick, smooth, and shiny. Using rubber spatula or wooden spoon, stir in flour mixture until just combined, about 1 minute. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts (if using), giving dough final stir to ensure no flour pockets remain.
Divide dough into 16 portions, each about 3 tablespoons (or use #24 cookie scoop). Arrange 5cm apart on prepared baking sheets, 8 dough balls per sheet. (Smaller baking sheets can be used, but will require 3 batches.)
Bake cookies 1 tray at a time until cookies the edges have begun to set but centers are still soft, 10 to 14 minutes, rotating baking sheet halfway through baking.
Transfer baking sheet to wire rack; cool cookies completely before serving.
Thank you for translating this recipe from #USDefaultism to the rest of the world.
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One cup of flour weighs less than one cup of sugar and different kinds of sugar also have different mass. And I rounded up or down to be in line with usual recipe amounts. But what I saw from the ranges given by helpful people here and what I found online, these vague recipes can fuck a rake. A fucking tablespoon of butter alone can be anything from 10 to 40 gram. With 14 tablespoons that gives you a range from 140g to 560g. That’s insanity.
That’s why it’s just easier to work in the original units of the recipe instead of needlessly converting it for nor real benefit. We’re making a single batch of cookies, not bread for an army or drugs; SI units and excessive precision just don’t matter that much. The recipe isn’t vague, just your understanding. A tablespoon isn’t a vague measurement, you’re just trying to adapt it to a needlessly precise unit of measure and forgetting everything your maths and sciense teachers should have taught you about significant digits.
A tablespoon as measurement for a non-fluid is extremely vague. How much mass do you pile onto it? There’s an extremely wide range of possibilities.
Also, this entire discussion under a post about how much different amounts of ingredients affect the outcome is just rich. Your recipe could be all of the examples in OP’s picture, depending on how people interpret it. If you treat baking recipes as art, sure, your recipe is great. If you want reproducible outcomes across different people it’s useless.
So what are 14 tablespoons now? About 150 grams or over half a kilo? Because that’s a massive difference. If that isn’t vague, what is it?
This comment is WILD.
They convert to mass precisely because volume changes so much with density.
my 100g of sugar will always be exactly the same as your 100g of sugar
But my 1 cup of sugar is going to be different to your 1 cup of sugar depending on how densely packed it is.
I love you.
Make sure you leave enough room for me to give that feller some of MY love too!
Damn. That sounds excellent.
Well, it would be if i knew how much ml a cup is and how much gramm a tablespoon butter. Butter molds even have those 50g marks here, y’know?
- 237
- 14
Thanks!
Just made these. They’re amazing, except next time I think I’ll use about half the chocolate chips.
I would happily eat each and every one of these experiments, for science
For science!!
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Probably that the control got some refrigeration. A lot of chocolate chip recipes call for an hour or so of chill time. It lets the flour get hydrated, firms up the fats, and that ends up controlling spread as well as giving improved texture
Control probably just refrigerated for one hour or so. Not sure how much difference it makes as i always chill it but i think i heard some people said the texture is different between non-refrigerated and refrigerated, and imo i can tell the difference between overnight and refrigerated for a few days, the latter is much more chewier.
15% more flour makes it stronger, refrigerating overnight fully hydrates the flour and prevents excessive spreading of melting butter, and all brown sugar brings flavor, and I suspect the extra flour would combat its tendency to get runny.
To much flour though, and then you’ve got shortbread instead of a chewy cookie
Melted butter is best pony.
Does baking powder mean lots of it or none of it?
Usually the recipe call for baking soda, i assume for this one they replace baking soda with baking powder?
my head canon: 100% baking powder with an image projected on it to look like a cookie
My #1 cookie recipe: https://hostthetoast.com/best-chewy-cafe-style-chocolate-chip-cookies/
Why do I so badly want this to be an alignment chart meme?
How do I make it so that when they come straight from the freezer, they don’t shatter but can be gnawed on?
I freeze all my cookie dough and just grab a few balls to cook at a time. Doesn’t matter if it’s choc chips, sugar, whatever and it always bakes great.
More brown sugar to white sugar ratio i think, molasses helps with the chewyness of the cookie. I use 165g of brown sugar with 150g of white sugar and it still comes out chewy after the dough being frozen.
I just skip the brown sugar entirely. I use all white sugar but with a tablespoon or so of molasses.
Brown sugar is just white sugar with molasses mixed in. Seems redundant to keep a separate ingredient around when molasses does the trick!
Yep! I only have jaggery and i don’t know how to measure those or molasses so i keep brown sugar for that case and jaggery for malaysian dessert
I like to keep a jar of molasses since it’s so handy. Oatmeal cookies, pumpkin or banana bread, ginger snaps, etc
Whenever I kept brown sugar, it would always go hard on me.
Thanks! I’ll give that a try
I feel like this post might be too interesting to qualify for this community!
I’m a fan of whichever one of these makes the cookies crispy on the bottom.
15% more flour looks like the best version to me.
Dammit, I was looking for the meme cookie.
I bet that one was eaten, it was probably tasty.
