Brown Butter Pistachio Chocolate Chip Cookie
Deep flavour. Crispy edges. Soft centre. No crumbs left.
I’ve been on a quest.
A quest to make the best chocolate chip cookies possible. Because (I’m sorry to tell you, but) most cookies out there are just way, way, waaaaaaay too sweet.
A few weeks ago, I came across a cookie recipe that contained 36g of sugar per cookie. Now, that’s criminal. As a reminder, the World Health Organization recommends consuming no more than 25g of added sugar* per day… Yeah, I know. Here, we're talking about that 'grab-a-glass-of-water-after-one-bite' level of sweetness! So, as a real cookie lover who wants to enjoy every bite of her cookies, I just had to come up with my own recipe.
*here, when we talk about sugar, we're really focusing on the added sugars in your food and drinks. We're not counting the sugars that are naturally found in whole foods, like the ones in a piece of fruit.
A note on sugar in baking:
While we often think of sugar just as a sweetener, sugar actually plays a surprising number of crucial roles in baking. Beyond flavor, sugar also affects the texture, color, and shelf life of a cake. In other words, if you cut down the sugar of a classic cookie recipe too much, your cookies will spread differently, become tough or dry, or simply lack that familiar golden hue. It’s a delicate balance, and you cannot just divide the sugar by half in any recipe. (Well, actually, you can. But, be ready to have a disappointing result.)
So, I started testing. Reducing sugar (little by little), browning butter, playing with the flour, adding liquids… I wanted a cookie that has a deep flavour, balanced, and indulgent. One you can actually finish, and think « I want another one! ». And finally, I achieved my new favorite cookie.
A brown butter pistachio chocolate chip cookie.. (Do I need to say more???) The recipe has been tested and tweaked until it reached my expectations: rich and nutty, not overly sweet, with gooey pockets of dark chocolate, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. Yummy out of 10!
Why it works:
The brown butter provides a deep, nutty base
The sugar is scaled back, but not so much that it compromises texture
The cookies are soft in the middle, with crispy edges
Now, for the recipe.
BROWN BUTTER PISTACHIOS CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES