Chipper No. 2

A few days after the insurrection, the fruits of my first cookie labors were gone, and I decided to try again. Recipe No. 2 in 100 Cookies is for Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies, and because you can never have too many Triple Cs, I proceeded in order.

Now, I won’t lie: I find brown butter to be a bit of a sham. Yes, it’s hip and trendy, and yes, every chef and baker on earth seems to think it’s the dish-transforming nectar of the gods. But whenever I use it, the same thing happens. It smells great, it looks lovely, I add it to whatever I’m making, and it tastes…fine. Just fine! If you ask me, brown butter was invented by dishwasher companies to trick unsuspecting home chefs into dirtying a pan they didn’t need — but, for the sake of Roughly 100, I put on my dunce cap and dirtied that pan.

These cookies were pretty freakin’ good, my friends, but it wasn’t the brown butter that did it.

In addition to fancy dairy, this recipe called for fancy chocolate and fancy finishing salt, and I really splashed out on those. I bought two bags of Guittard baking wafers and a cellar of Camargue fleur de sel as a Christmas gift from me to me — and those make a difference you can taste.

When they were fresh, these bad boys were next level. The (extremely) rough chop I’d given the chocolate led to lots of variation between big melty bites and cute lil’ dark chocolate flecks, and the salt created the type of contrast that I at least am much more used to from a professional bakery than any experiments I might do at home. The dough, as I predicted, tasted like regular ol’ dough. The mix-ins changed the game.

Unfortunately, these cookies didn’t age very well. The soft-insides, crispy-edges texture they had straight out of the oven cooled to a uniform chewiness after a couple of days, almost like a toffee. I tried giving them a zap in the microwave so at least the chocolate would be melty, but even that didn’t really save the day.

I would definitely make these cookies again, but only if I either quartered the recipe or had enough people over to polish off two dozen at once (so, you know, maybe in 2023). In the meantime, though, there is a lesson here: Invest in salt and chocolate.