Sourdough overnight chocolate chip cookies are chocolatey, complex in flavor, not overly sweet, and pure perfection. I’ve never tasted a truly amazing cookie until I had this one!

I have had such a difficult time finding a perfect chocolate chip cookie. I had one recipe I loved for a little while, but I could not consistently get an amazing, domed cookie. Sometimes they were great. Sometimes they fell flat. Literally.

But then I tried a sourdough chocolate chip cookie and I was in love! They take a little bit of thinking ahead, but they are so worth the effort!

What are the benefits of sourdough cookies?

The wild yeast in sourdough would normally rise products like bread, rolls, etc.. However, you don’t put it in cookies to cause them to rise. The baking powder and baking soda act as rising agents in these.

Instead, the sourdough benefits the cookies by beginning to break down the sugars, gluten, and phytic acid in the cookies over the 24 hour fermentation process.

I know cookies are not really supposed to be healthy, but sourdough helps these to be better for you than their regular cookie counterparts.

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Begin your sourdough overnight chocolate chip cookies with browned butter

The first step in making the overnight chocolate chip cookies is to make the browned butter in advance and cool it.

How to make browned butter

For this overnight chocolate chip cookie recipe, the browned butter needs to be made in advance and cooled. I really thought I could skip that cooling step, but I ended up making plain chocolate cookies because all the chips melted. Bummer!

So here’s my process of browning butter.

1. Start with a pan that’s larger than you think it needs to be.

You need to start with a large pan because the butter AT LEAST quadruples. I had a really unfortunate situation where I was using a very small butter melting pot and I lost about half my butter because it just foams and foams and went everywhere!

Use 2 sticks of butter plus 2T for this recipe. Browned butter evaporates water out of the butter, so any time you’re swapping out butter for browned butter, you need to add an extra tablespoon per stick of butter. That way you end up with the correct amount after evaporation.

By the way, you won’t need to stir the butter until I tell you to in the steps. Just let it go and do its thing.

2. Melt the butter on medium low. You’ll begin to see the milk solids come to the top.

3. After a little while, the bubbles will change and the milk solids will begin to drop to the bottom of the pan.

4. Once all the milk solids fall, the oil that’s left begins to really bubble a ton and foam up.

5. It starts browning! You’ll start to see the foam turning golden. At this point, I start to stir.

6. You can get it as golden as you’d like.

I took this one pretty far and it gave the cookies a super nutty flavor. You can stop the process sooner though. It is really easy to go too far and burn the butter. That is always so sad! You can try to just lightly brown the butter and then play with it as you make the recipe multiple times and decide which way you like best.

7. Let your browned butter cool.

Cool butter until it’s not hot. If it’s too warm, it will melt your chocolate chips. Don’t ask me how I know that…

8. When you use the browned butter, use it all! The brown bits at the bottom are the toasted milk solids. That’s what gives the browned butter the deep, nutty flavor.

How to make sourdough overnight chocolate chip cookies

Mix:

Take that cooled browned butter and add to it the white sugar and the dark brown sugar. Whip it up for a few minutes. I use my Kitchen Aid Mixer for this part. You could just use a handheld mixer if you’d like. I don’t know how well it would work to do it by hand. It may get hard to stir after incorporating the dry ingredients later.

Add:

Add the egg, vanilla, and sourdough starter and turn the mixer on until it’s all incorporated. You can use bubbly, fed starter like I used here. Or you can use sourdough discard straight from the fridge. Either way is perfectly fine.

Sift:

At this point, I put my mesh strainer directly on the cookie bowl and sift my dry ingredients in. Add the flour, baking soda and baking powder. Whisk to get it to go through the mesh.

Mix the batter until the flour is just incorporated. You don’t want to work the gluten in the flour to make a tough cookie, so just stop the mixer as soon as you see the flour all mixed in.

Add:

Then add your chocolate chips or chunks and mix again until they are worked throughout the dough. I used dark chocolate chunks, but my kids LOVE these with milk chocolate. You could also use the traditional semi sweet OR a mixture of all of them.

I was reading a recipe recently that recommended mixing dark chocolate chunks, mini semi sweet, and regular sized milk chocolate chips. She said the mixture really made the chocolate go throughout the cookie and give you all the flavors. I should definitely try that next time!

Bake:

I use a cookie scooper and put them on a cool baking pan. Pop in the oven at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes. I found 12 minutes to be perfect for my oven.

If you use a larger scooper, you’ll need to increase the cooking time to offset for the larger sized cookie.

When you take them out of the oven, hit the pan 2-3 times on the countertop to flatten them just a little bit. Then add flaked salt on top for that salty, chocolatey perfection.

This batter can stay in the fridge for about 3 days. When I made them, I pulled them out and made one fresh batch each night for a couple nights in a row. It was really yummy to have freshly baked cookies at night that I didn’t have to make that day!

Do I HAVE to refrigerate the cookie dough overnight?

Nope. Sort of like when you make my sourdough pancakes, or pumpkin sourdough waffles, you can use the batter right away! I’ve made them immediately multiple times and they were good.

HOWEVER, sourdough needs time to work its magic. The cookies are really really good when they have 24-48 hours for the sourdough to go to work and do its thing.

I feel like they are less sweet after they have been left overnight because that sourdough starter goes to work eating the carbs. And all that fed sourdough makes the flavor so much richer. So try it both ways and see what you prefer!

Can I leave out the sourdough out of the overnight chocolate chip cookies?

You probably could, but that is really what makes the cookies more flavorful and complex. If you take out the sourdough starter, you’re kind of just left with regular chocolate chip cookies – which are great – but not quite the same.

Do I have to take the time to brown the butter?

Nope! It adds a deeper, more complex flavor. But it’s totally not necessary! When you brown butter, it evaporates off some of the liquid, so you’ll need to reduce the amount of butter to 2 sticks if you don’t brown the butter in order to keep your liquid levels at the same amount.

If you’ve never tried browned butter though, you should. You’ll be in for a treat!

Do I have to use dark chocolate chips in these cookies?

Nope! My kids LOVE these with milk chocolate chips. Obviously, they are great with semi sweet chips, like normal chocolate chip cookies. But my favorite way to eat these is with dark chocolate chunks and topped with big flakes of sea salt.

I’m not big on coyingly sweet things, so the browned butter and the dark chocolate give it a sweet and nutty flavor, but it’s not overly sweet. If you really like sweet things, you can move to semi sweet or milk chocolate chips. They are both really good!

Do I have to use dark brown sugar?

Nope! You can use regular brown sugar if you only have that. I really like the richness that the dark brown sugar adds to the cookie. But with that being said, most chocolate chip cookie recipes use regular brown sugar, so that would work perfectly fine!

How do I store sourdough overnight chocolate chip cookies?

After they cool, I store these for 3-5 days in a zip top bag or an airtight container. You could even put them in a large mason jar and put them on an open shelf. That would look amazing!

If you’ve never tried sourdough cookies before, I’d love to hear what you think about these! I’d also try cooking a batch the same day, then the next day and see what your family prefers. I couldn’t believe how much better mine thought it was after that 24 hour overnight in the fridge!

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