Name: Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 12 min
Total time: 12 h 37 min
Yield: 16 cookies
Cuisine: American
Ingredients: 225g unsalted butter; 200g light brown soft sugar; 100g caster sugar; 2 large eggs, fridge-cold; 2 tsp vanilla extract; 340g plain flour; 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda; 1 tsp fine sea salt; 250g dark chocolate, roughly chopped — not chips; Flaky sea salt, for the tops

Method

8 steps

Brown the butter

Melt the butter in a light-coloured pan over medium heat, then keep going. It will foam, subside, and then the milk solids will toast on the base and turn amber. Swirl constantly at that point and pull it off as soon as it smells nutty.
Timer: 5 minutes
5 minutes remaining
Scrape everything, including the toasted solids at the bottom, into a heatproof bowl and leave until barely warm. Rushing this scrambles the eggs later.
Timer: 20 minutes
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Make the dough

Whisk both sugars into the cooled butter, then the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla. Whisk for a good minute until it looks glossy and slightly paler.
Timer: 1 minute
1 minute remaining
Fold in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and fine salt until only a few dry streaks remain, then fold in the chopped chocolate. Stop as soon as it comes together.
Cover and refrigerate overnight, at least twelve hours. This is the step people skip and it is the one that makes the biggest difference to both flavour and spread.

Bake

Heat the oven to 180C fan. Roll the cold dough into balls slightly larger than a golf ball and space them well apart on lined trays — six per tray, no more.
Bake until the edges are set and golden but the centres still look distinctly underdone and puffy.
Timer: 12 minutes
12 minutes remaining
Scatter with flaky salt and leave on the tray for ten minutes. They finish cooking in the residual heat and collapse into the right texture. Moving them early is how you get a raw middle.
Timer: 10 minutes
10 minutes remaining

Equipment

Light-coloured saucepan (you need to see the butter colour)
Digital kitchen scales

Notes from testing

I tested this over about nine batches. The findings, in order of how much they mattered: browning the butter, resting the dough overnight so the flour fully hydrates, and chopping a bar of chocolate instead of using chips so you get molten seams rather than isolated dots. Baking them slightly under and letting them set on the tray is what gives the fudgy middle.

Nutrition

Estimated, per cookie

Estimated nutrition information per cookie
Energy	348 kcal
Fat	19.1 g
of which saturates	11.6 g
Carbohydrate	40.7 g
of which sugars	25.3 g
Fibre	1.9 g
Protein	4.2 g
Sodium	268 mg

Nutrition is an automated estimate calculated from USDA FoodData Central and UK CoFID data. It is not a substitute for professional dietary advice and should not be relied on for medical purposes. Source: USDA FoodData Central.