Perfect Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies At Home
A fresh baked cookie piping hot, right out of the oven, is what I consider the greatest dessert of all time. Not many would argue with that, but what no one can seem to agree on is what the perfect homemade chocolate chip cookie recipe is and each persons cookie preference is tailored to their individual preferences. Not to mention, when you find common ground on the recipe and you can follow it to a T, you can STILL get cookies that are wildly different and not nearly as good as the bakery down the street.
Two things are for sure - taste and texture are what everyone is looking for in a cookie and theres a reason bakery style cookie dough is better than homemade or the typical take and bake cookies you'll find in the store. They have mastered high level baking techniques like browning butter, they mix in a consistent environment of a commercial kitchen, and they measure their ingredients by weight, not volume amoungst many other variables. Baking at home can yield inconsistencies in the dough that lead to inconsistencies in the bake, but BAKR is here to fix that...our Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk frozen cookie dough is packaged as single serve cookie dough for one or two nightly treats. Our recipe has been tried by 1,000's and has even landed us a collab with 3 Michelin Star restaurant, Alinea...it's that good.
That's just the recipe - it doesn't even start to touch on the bake time preferences for the cookies...it his has been a point of contention for as long as time and hits close to home when even my husband and I are debating. We have such a long running disagreement, we include TWO separate bake times depending on how you like your cookies. When it comes down to the choices, there are two clear favorites: ooey gooey and crispy chewy. Anything outside of these two are to be explored at your own risk.
For starters, there are are few things you want to consider throughout the process:
- Preheat your oven fully - this is an excruciating step, we know - but, your cookie will bake so much more evenly and leave you with a much better finished product. When in doubt, we turn the oven on almost every night before dinner to make sure we are prepared for the inevitable post-dinner craving for something sweet.
- Cookie Placement - if you are just baking one cookie, place that sucker in the middle of the pan and slide the tray onto the center of your oven rack. If there are multiple cookies you are adding to the sheet pan, make sure they are evenly spread out to give them room to spread and not run into one another
- Rotate your tray mid-way through baking - ovens can have hot spots, it's not uncommon for one area in the oven to bake considerably hotter than another. Knowing that, it's best to check your cookies half way through the bake time and rotate the pan 180 degrees and finish baking.
So - on one hand, we have the ooey gooey crowd. This seems to be the household favorite, with many polls being done on our page and votes typically averaging above 75% FOR OOEY GOOEY. From freshly made dough, we would be around 12-15 minutes at 350, depending on if it has been refrigerated beforehand. For our frozen cookie dough or other frozen doughs, we prefer to lower the bake temperature to 325 for 14-16 minutes. On the lower end is a cookie that is BARELY done, some may consider it rare or underbaked. The amount of gooiness preferred in your cookie is really a personal preference, typically when we bake our BAKR cookies, we start checking them around 14 minutes into baking. Pending on your oven and gooey desires, this may be done for some and if so, pull that sucker out. If there is still wetness on the top of the dough, that may be a sign it needs slightly more time if you aren't an ooey gooey purist. A perfect gooey cookie (in my opinion) should be cooked slightly over the time you start to see no shine in the center. Be patient and let it cool for around 5-10 minutes, but, trust us…that cookie is going to be a piece of baking perfection, I’m starting to drool just thinking about it.
On the other hand, we have the crispy chewy group. This cookie is baked for a few more minutes (16-18 minutes at 325) past when the middle is no longer showing signs of moisture. The cookie should be starting to turn golden brown on the edges and for maximal crisp, should be left to cool a bit longer than gooey to allow for the cookie to firm up a bit. Trust us, the wait is worth it if you want to have the crunch. Now this cookie shouldn’t be overlooked for still being a warm center of perfection. With this option, you get cookies that are fully baked on the outside and yet it is still a tender center, which can provide a great chew if the dough is made just right.
Either way you choose to bake up your cookies, you are never going to have a bad time when eating a fresh baked cookie. In our experience every oven and every oven is going to be slightly different. We suggest testing different bake times until you get the desired outcome for your perfect cookie. At the end of the day, there really isn’t a right or wrong answer (much like everything else in the world), so do what makes you happy. We’ve even found a few fans of predominate crisp and honestly at that point, bake the cookie as long as your heart desires to get that thang nice and crispy.
Usually by this point in my blogs, I start to crave a cookie and it is about time for my daily brown butter chocolate chip…I always crave a little something sweet at night and our cookies just hit the spot. I’m an ooey gooey girl through and through. 😊
Happy Baking
Lex 
P.S. PRO TIP: ALWAYS SALT YOUR COOKIE! We found the best method for us is to salt the cookie after baking, but we’ve heard some people salt before. Doesn’t really make a difference to us, the only fact of the matter is…ya need to do it. We include Maldon Sea Salt in our Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk dough packages and just trust us, it’s so worth it. Some people don’t prefer salt on their cookies, but in our opinion, there is no beating a salted Chocolate Chip cookie!