My Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies

Happy National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day! I usually roll my eyes at all these food holidays, but any excuse to bake cookies is good enough in my book. Chocolate chip cookies are a timeless classic, and nothing beats one warm out of the oven.

I’m a stress baker, which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in the sense that, when I have ideas for a new recipe, or for improvements on an existing recipe, I use it as an excuse to test my theories. That’s how I landed on this recipe—stress baking experiments. I think it took three rounds before I was happy enough to share the recipe. What a hard job food blogging is, right?

What’s the curse about being a stress baker, you ask? It’s a curse in the sense that I end up with a kitchen full of baked goods that I don’t need to eat all myself. But hey, my coworkers usually get the results of my experiments.

I started with a base recipe and tweaked it from there. What takes these cookies to a whole new level is… browned butter. It’s one small, extra step in the process, but it makes a world of difference that you taste in the first bite. Browning butter is melting it, and keeping it on the heat until it reaches a more brown color and gives off a nutty, butterscotchy aroma. The darkest you should let the butter get is a caramel color.

You don’t have to brown the butter, but try it once and I think you’ll agree that it takes the cookies up to a whole new level.

I tend to prefer my cookies soft, chewy, fluffy, and gooey right out of the oven. For chewier cookies, use more brown sugar than white sugar in your recipe. I remembered from an old snickerdoodle recipe that cream of tartar gives them a fluffy texture, so I added a dash of that here in hopes of the same effect. Spoiler alert: it worked!

Let’s make some chocolate chip cookies.

This recipe makes about four dozen cookies, which is plenty to keep some for yourself and share with your friends. Or coworkers. Or take to a tailgate. You can chill the dough for longer than an hour, but then it gets a bit harder to scoop, so 30-60 minutes was the prime chilling time.

Gluten-free flour blends work here, too; my go-to is Bob’s Red Mill baking blend. I haven’t tried these with almond flour yet, but I’d advise against coconut flour. It’s very finicky, the substitution ratio is weird, and… it’s just messy. Learn from my mistakes!

If you give these a try, let me know how they turn out and how you like them!