Browned Butter and Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies
/Thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies filled with nutty browned butter, toasted walnuts, and puddles of dark chocolate. The best simple chocolate chip cookie recipe.
New year, new cookies! You can never go wrong with the classic chocolate chip, and this week, we’re making them my very favorite way—with toasty walnuts, a little rye flour, and browned butter, aka, maximum nuttiness.
We spent last weekend disconnected from the entire world in an adorable little Getaway cabin in the woods of Northern Minnesota. We locked our phones away and spent the weekend roasting marshmallows, cozy-ing up with good books, and teaching ourselves all sorts of two-person card games. Oh, and we cooked. Cabin cooking was such a fun little challenge for me as I prepped like a mad woman before we left on Friday afternoon and played a very intense game of cooler Tetris to get all of my tools and ingredients in as few bags as possible.
I brought along my dutch oven and the theme of the weekend was flavorful, not-boring meals that you can make in one pot. We had great success! I made a roasted potato, rotisserie chicken, and kale hash loaded with lots of bright dill and charred lemons and a blistered tomato, shallot, white bean and sausage stew that we sopped up with crispy pieces of bread. And I made these cookies.
I used this little getaway as an opportunity to test this recipe one more time “for quality control purposes”, ya know? And good thing I did because I completely ruined them. I don’t know if you’ve seen it on the interwebs, but there is this trick where you put flaky salt on the bottom of the cookie before baking instead of sprinkling it on top afterwards so that the salt will stick better. I thought to myself, “Wow, what a smart idea. I’ll definitely do that!” except instead of flaky salt I was using ultra-coarse vanilla infused French grey salt and instead of doing a little sprinkle number, I decided to do sort of a pressing situation resulting in far too much salt. Like inedible saltiness. So we sat in our cute tiny cabin and used a butter knife to slice off the tops of the cookies and ate them like little cookie bites.
But don’t worry! I made them one more time when we got home and went back to my tried and true sprinkle method and they were perfect and delicious and possibly one of the best cookies I’ve made in a long time. Moral of the story, don’t try everything you see on the internet…except for these cookies. You should definitely try these, they’re very good!
how to make browned butter chocolate chip cookies
These cookies are great because they are super straight forward in the methodology, but still pack a bit of a flavor punch (through our walnut + browned butter + rye flour trio). Here’s how you make ‘em!
Toast the walnuts! Toasting your nuts for just 5 minutes or so creates malliard browning, which is a reaction between heat and proteins (not sugar, that’s caramelization) that makes brown food brown and imparts that “browned” (aka toasty and delicious) flavor. When you toast your nuts, you’re adding an entirely new depth of flavor so pop them in the oven for a few minutes while you prep the rest of your ingredients.
Brown the butter. Browning butter is one of the simplest and most effective ways to add flavor to baked goods. When you brown butter, you are simply cooking it until the milk solids begin to caramelize. Put your butter in a saucepan and set it over medium heat, swirling it every minute or two while it melts. You will continue to cook it as it melts, bubbles, and then begins to foam. When the foam begins to subside, you should be able to see little amber flecks forming on the bottom of the pan and the butter should smell really fragrant (like toasted nuts and vanilla and magic). At this point, quickly remove the butter from the heat and transfer it to another bowl to stop the cooking and let it cool to room temperature.
Make the cookie dough. For this recipe, we’ll mix the cooled browned butter and sugars until wet and sandy and then add eggs and vanilla to help homogenize the batter. Next comes dry ingredients, followed by walnuts and chocolate.
Chill the dough. This recipe only needs about 30 minutes of chilling time. You can definitely chill the dough longer if you’d like but the cookies won’t spread quite as much and they will be more round than flat. You can read all about why we chill our cookie dough here!
