Cooooooooooooooookies

I have made Joy the Baker's best brown butter chocolate chip cookies. Much like Ree's knock you naked brownies, the recipe title does not lie. Honestly, all other chocolate chip cookies are ruined for me. I've now made this recipe twice, and the second time wasn't as good as the first, but I know exactly why, so the next time I make them I should be right back on course. Let me be clear--the second batch was still good. Just not swoon/call-911 good. The first batch...? I needed to be resuscitated.

I made a few tweaks to the recipe, partially due to what was in my baking cabinet, partially due to what was available at the grocery store, and lastly due to personal preference.

Here are the willing volunteers for greatness. The recipe calls for light brown sugar, but I only had dark brown sugar and was too lazy to buy another variety, so I just rolled with it (tweak 1). The dough starts with a twist on the usual--one stick of butter will be beaten with sugars (brown and white), but the other. The other is browned on the stovetop, and left to cool its delicious nutty jets before being added to the batter as well.

Pardon the blue bowl, but here's the brown butter--you can see the caramelized bits doing their thing.

Once the butter and sugars are creamed, some flour is dumped into the mix, finished by folding with a spatula to avoid over-working and to incorporate all the chocolate once it's added. This recipe uses more salt than a typical cookie recipe because the point is to taste the salt, not just have it enhance the other flavors. Even without the salt sprinkled on top (tweak 3), the cookies left an extraordinarily pleasing salty taste after the sweetness of each bite quiets down.

The other tweak (2) I made was using semi-sweet chocolate chunks instead of the called-for bittersweet. I was worried that it would be too sweet, but actually, the balance was pretty nice. I'd definitely try this with bittersweet, but our grocery store is heavy on semisweet varieties. I'd like to try adding some coffee to see what depth that adds, but for now I'm happy with keeping it simple. Maybe as prime holiday baking season comes, I'll experiment a little. I'll keep you posted.

A key to these is also to let the dough chill in the freezer for 30 minutes. Much like a shortbread recipe, the dough needs time to let the flavors marinate and for the butter to relax into the floury bits. It also makes it easier to scoop the dough into nice little portions. I just used my regular old ice cream scoop, which is about 2Tbsp, and allowed for about 36 cookies--perfectly in line with JtB's estimation.

I found what worked best for scooping was to flatten the dough into a disk (like shortbread) and let is chill. Then, just at the end I rolled it into a brick sort of thing. haha I dunno...it felt scientific at the time.

When I made the cookies the second time, I didn't let the dough chill quite long enough (I tried rolling the dough into a log first, but it didn't chill enough because it didn't have the benefit of surface area). What I learned from not-cold-enough dough is that it will result in a flatter cookie that is crispy throughout. When the dough gets nice and cold and is then baked, you get lovely cookies that are crisp around the edges, and then chewy gooey centers, thanks to the bit of rise they get. Perfection. Absolute and irrefutable perfection.