You Can't Ignore This Step When Making Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Brown butter is often called liquid gold, and for good reason: It's the secret ingredient for the best chocolate chip cookies. This melted unsalted butter, cooked until the milk fats have turned brown and caramelized, develops a nutty taste and can transform the flavor of almost everything it touches. However, when you're making brown butter chocolate chip cookies, you need to make certain to immediately transfer your brown butter from the pan into a cool bowl, or you risk it burning.

You also want to give it 10 to 15 minutes to cool off. Getting it to room temperature is the sweet spot. Why? Because hot brown butter can prematurely melt the chocolate chips, and it could take your cookie dough a lot longer to cool in the fridge. Chilled cookie dough is essential because if it's too warm, it will cause your cookies to spread as they bake.  Why use brown butter in your recipe instead of regular, softened butter? This simple switch-up changes the texture of your cookies, deflating them and making them denser with a chewier interior and crispy edges.

If you're baking homemade chocolate chip cookies and are thinking about swapping brown butter in place of regular butter, there is one other secret you need to know about baking with it if you don't want to compromise texture, and it's all about moisture. Butter is 15% water, and when you melt and brown it, it loses water. To compensate for this loss, you need to add water to the brown butter after it has cooled a bit, otherwise you'll end up with dry-tasting, greasy cookies. 

How much water? This is where it becomes a bit of an art form. You need approximately one tablespoon of water for each half to a whole stick of butter your recipe calls for. But the amount is really recipe-dependent, so you may have to experiment a couple of times to get the exact amount of liquid right. You can use brown butter instead of regular butter with success in most baked goods as long as you follow this simple rule. And if you love brown butter chocolate chip cookies, why not try an elevated brown butter frosting the next time you bake a cake?