Operation Pinterest: Browned Butter Cookies

For the second installment of Operation Pinterest I made Browned Butter & Sea Salt Chocolate Chip Cookies from Ambitious Kitchen. I had only experienced browned butter once before, in a recipe similar to this that involved Nutella as well. (If you follow my Instagram you may remember, those were a little bit of a disaster..) Those cookies were very good, but a bit of a hassle to make, so when I saw this recipe I thought I'd give it a shot.



The ingredients for these cookies are relatively simple, the one strange thing being plain greek yogurt. But otherwise standard ingredients: flour (gluten-free of course), brown sugar, granulated sugar, baking soda, sea salt, vanilla extract, butter, eggs, semi-sweet and milk chocolate chips.



I started off by browning the butter first. I wanted to get that out of the way and give it ample time to cool off before it was needed. If you've never browned butter, it's pretty weird the first time. You just keep heating the butter on the stove until you're totally sure you've done something entirely wrong. Nope, that's just browning butter. Heat it over medium heat, whisking it all the while, until it foams and little brown particles start appearing and it begins to smell nutty. Remove it from heat and let it cool.



Now move on and combine the flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl. Then, in a separate bowl, mix together the sugars and butter together. Then mix in the egg, yolk, vanilla, and yogurt. Then you'll have something a little like this (pictured above).



Next mix in the dry ingredients, then stir in the chocolate chips. But let's be honest, I'm too lazy to hand-stir chips into the dough, so I just used the mixer for that too.. Then you chill the dough; I froze it for about 30 minutes.



Finally measure out the dough into balls. The recipe called for 1/4 cup cookies, but I made mine 2 tbs leveled off. I also have a terrible inability to judge how much space cookies need to cook, so give them more room than I did. :) Sprinkle them with a little sea salt and bake them in the oven at 350* F for 9-11 minutes.

 

 Thoughts and Advice

•  These cookies rock! I think the flavor is exactly what Monique was going for: a luxurious chocolate chip cookie. It's not really a "specialty" cookie, but a phenomenal chocolate chip cookie.


• I don't think I'll chill the dough next time. It made it a little too hard while scooping and I've never really been a fan of chilling dough anyway.


• I definitely think 1/4 cup cookies would be huge, 2 tbs was a great size for me. That yielded around 24 cookies.


•  I had to cook mine a little longer than 11 minutes to get the edges to brown, maybe around 15 minutes. Play it by ear. 

 

If you'd like to try this recipe out, please go visit the original blog Ambitious Kitchen and let her know how you like them. She's actually got a lot of cool gluten-free recipes, too! As always, your thoughts and suggestions are more than welcome in the comments! Enjoy. :)