How to Make Brown Butter Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookies

Brown butter sourdough chocolate chip cookies are chocolatey, with a complex flavor and crispy edges. They are not overly sweet, perfectly golden brown, and pure perfection. I’ve never tasted a truly amazing cookie until I had this one! So next time you need a sweet treat filled with loads of melty chocolate chips, try this!

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

But then I tried a brown butter sourdough chocolate chip cookies 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 active sourdough starter 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 cookie dough chill and fermentation process. This important step helps with digestion and also develops that complex flavor that truly adds a unique depth of flavor to the sourdough cookie.

I know cookies are not really supposed to be healthy, but sourdough helps these to be better for you than their regular cookie counterparts. It’s also a great way to use up leftover sourdough starter or sourdough starter discard.

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Begin your brown butter sourdough chocolate chip cookies by browning the butter

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

How to make browned butter

For this brow butter sourdough chocolate chip cookies recipe, the unsalted butter needs to be browned in advance and cooled to room temperature. 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 medium saucepan or large pan because the butter AT LEAST quadruples. The water content in the butter begins to evaporate as the butter melts and begins to foam.

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 unsalted 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 balance the water content and 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 heat. 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 brown flecks in the melted butter and the foam will begin turning golden. At this point, I start to stir with a wooden spoon.

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

I took this one pretty far and the brown color develops into a super nutty flavor. It really gives it a unique depth of flavor that makes these the best homemade cookies!

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 room temperature. 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 Stand Mixer for this part. You could just use a hand mixer or electric mixer with a large mixing bowl if you’d like.

If you wanted to mix it by hand, do that in a separate bowl. It may get hard to stir by hand once you begin incorporating the wet ingredients and dry ingredients later.

Add:

Add the whole eggs, pure vanilla extract, and active starter (or sourdough starter discard) 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 flour mixture in. Add the all purpose 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 chopped chocolate, chocolate chunks or any combination and mix again until they are worked throughout the dough. I used dark chocolate chips, but my kids LOVE these with milk chocolate chips. You could also use the traditional semi-sweet chocolate chips OR a mixture of all of them for the best flavor.

I was reading a recipe recently that recommended mixing dark chocolate chunks, mini semi-sweet chocolate chips, 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 scoop and put the cookie dough balls on a parchment-lined baking sheet or cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Pop in the oven at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes of bake time. I found 12 minutes to be perfect for my oven.

If you use a larger cookie scoop or an ice cream scoop, you’ll need to increase the baking time by a few extra minutes to offset for the larger sized cookie.

When you take them out of the oven, hit the baking tray 2-3 times on the countertop to flatten them just a little bit. Then add a sprinkle of flaky sea salt on the tops of the cookies for that sweet-salty, chocolatey perfection.

Cool on a wire rack or cooling rack after baking.

This large bowl of batter can stay in the fridge, covered with plastic wrap, 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!

Storing the brown butter sourdough chocolate chip cookies

After the cookies cool, I store these for 3-5 days in a zip-top freezer bag, or in an airtight container. You can also store them in a freezer-safe bag frozen for months. You can even freeze the frozen dough balls the best homemade cookies anytime.

FAQs

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 starter 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, so it’s worth the extra step.

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 then you would just be left with a classic chocolate chip cookie. Still good, but the sourdough discard cookies have a complex flavor that makes them really special.

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

Nope! It’s optional, but this important step adds a unique depth of flavor, and a brown color and nutty flavor. But it’s totally not necessary! When you brown butter, it evaporates off some of the water content, 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 chocolate chips, like normal chocolate chip cookies. But my favorite way to eat these is with dark chocolate chips or chopped chocolate chunks and a sprinkle of flaky 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 brown butter sourdough chocolate chip cookies?

After they cooling on a wire rack, I store these for 3-5 days in a zip-top bag (or freezer bag), in an airtight container, or wrapped in plastic wrap. You could even put them in a large mason jar and put them on an open shelf. That would look amazing!

UPDATE:

I made these cookies recently and decided I wanted to make a bigger cookie with a chewy texture. This time I made them MUCH bigger made sure to undercook them just a bit so that they had a chewy center with crispy edges. I did press them down lightly to make them a little flat since they don’t change shape a lot when they cook.

They were absolutely delicious cookies! Make sure to try it this way too because I’m in love with these brown butter sourdough chocolate chip cookies!

If you’ve never tried brown butter chocolate chip cookies before, I’d love to hear what you think about these sourdough discard cookies! 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 that 24 hour overnight in the fridge gave me the best cookies with the best flavor!

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