Browned Butter and Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies filled with nutty browned butter, toasted walnuts, and puddles of dark chocolate. The best simple chocolate chip cookie recipe.

New year, new cookies! You can never go wrong with the classic chocolate chip, and this week, we’re making them my very favorite way—with toasty walnuts, a little rye flour, and browned butter, aka, maximum nuttiness.

We spent last weekend disconnected from the entire world in an adorable little Getaway cabin in the woods of Northern Minnesota. We locked our phones away and spent the weekend roasting marshmallows, cozy-ing up with good books, and teaching ourselves all sorts of two-person card games. Oh, and we cooked. Cabin cooking was such a fun little challenge for me as I prepped like a mad woman before we left on Friday afternoon and played a very intense game of cooler Tetris to get all of my tools and ingredients in as few bags as possible.

I brought along my dutch oven and the theme of the weekend was flavorful, not-boring meals that you can make in one pot. We had great success! I made a roasted potato, rotisserie chicken, and kale hash loaded with lots of bright dill and charred lemons and a blistered tomato, shallot, white bean and sausage stew that we sopped up with crispy pieces of bread. And I made these cookies.

I used this little getaway as an opportunity to test this recipe one more time “for quality control purposes”, ya know? And good thing I did because I completely ruined them. I don’t know if you’ve seen it on the interwebs, but there is this trick where you put flaky salt on the bottom of the cookie before baking instead of sprinkling it on top afterwards so that the salt will stick better. I thought to myself, “Wow, what a smart idea. I’ll definitely do that!” except instead of flaky salt I was using ultra-coarse vanilla infused French grey salt and instead of doing a little sprinkle number, I decided to do sort of a pressing situation resulting in far too much salt. Like inedible saltiness. So we sat in our cute tiny cabin and used a butter knife to slice off the tops of the cookies and ate them like little cookie bites.

But don’t worry! I made them one more time when we got home and went back to my tried and true sprinkle method and they were perfect and delicious and possibly one of the best cookies I’ve made in a long time. Moral of the story, don’t try everything you see on the internet…except for these cookies. You should definitely try these, they’re very good!

how to make browned butter chocolate chip cookies

These cookies are great because they are super straight forward in the methodology, but still pack a bit of a flavor punch (through our walnut + browned butter + rye flour trio). Here’s how you make ‘em!

  1. Toast the walnuts! Toasting your nuts for just 5 minutes or so creates malliard browning, which is a reaction between heat and proteins (not sugar, that’s caramelization) that makes brown food brown and imparts that “browned” (aka toasty and delicious) flavor. When you toast your nuts, you’re adding an entirely new depth of flavor so pop them in the oven for a few minutes while you prep the rest of your ingredients.

  2. Brown the butter. Browning butter is one of the simplest and most effective ways to add flavor to baked goods. When you brown butter, you are simply cooking it until the milk solids begin to caramelize. Put your butter in a saucepan and set it over medium heat, swirling it every minute or two while it melts. You will continue to cook it as it melts, bubbles, and then begins to foam. When the foam begins to subside, you should be able to see little amber flecks forming on the bottom of the pan and the butter should smell really fragrant (like toasted nuts and vanilla and magic). At this point, quickly remove the butter from the heat and transfer it to another bowl to stop the cooking and let it cool to room temperature.

  3. Make the cookie dough. For this recipe, we’ll mix the cooled browned butter and sugars until wet and sandy and then add eggs and vanilla to help homogenize the batter. Next comes dry ingredients, followed by walnuts and chocolate.

  4. Chill the dough. This recipe only needs about 30 minutes of chilling time. You can definitely chill the dough longer if you’d like but the cookies won’t spread quite as much and they will be more round than flat. You can read all about why we chill our cookie dough here!

A Collection of Christmas Cookies

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It’s Cookie Week around here which simply means that we’re spending the whole week talking about cookies and only cookies. If you haven’t checked out Monday’s brand new biscotti recipe, hop on over and give it a read and add them to your cookie baking list too.

Christmas cookies are especially fun to make (and enjoy) because usually, they are little crunchy works of art. Here are a few of my very favorite holiday cookie recipes from the blog.

You can go directly to each of these recipes by clicking on the corresponding photo.

And because any cookie can be a Christmas cookie if you just believe, you can browse all of my cookie recipes here.

Biscotti with Dark Chocolate, Hazelnuts, and Clementine

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Crunchy, Italian-style biscotti studded with puddles of dark chocolate, toasted hazelnuts, and bright winter clementines. This simple biscotti recipe will make a perfect addition to your holiday cookie baking.

Making friends as an adult is hard. Moving to a new city and then making friends as an adult is even harder. Moving to a new city, running your own business completely from your home and then making friends as an adult is really really hard. So many of our relationships are built on shared experiences—there are friends you went to high school with, those you went to college with, and co-workers turned friends—but how do you find your people in an entirely new place when there aren’t many other people around to connect with?

This past six months in Minneapolis has been so much fun. We’ve gotten to explore a brand new city, eaten at so many new restaurants, enjoyed beautiful summer and fall weather, and so much more. But it’s also been really lonely at times. Since I work entirely from home as a freelancer and run a business that I built by myself, I’ve found it’s been a bit tricky to meet new people. I’ve made a few local internet-turned-real-life friends which has been really neat. In fact, in having coffee with Amanda from HeartBeet Kitchen, I met the very first person to have the same job as me and that was a super fun experience.

I’ve also been very blessed to have a husband with a job that involves people. His co-workers and their families have been so generous in helping us create a little home here in the North. Sometimes, it’s easy for me to give into to feeling sorry for myself. To break down and cry because I miss my people who now live thousands of miles away and because I feel like I can count all of my Minneapolis friends on one hand. But when I step back and think about it, I realize how lucky I am to have these few new friends because in the span of just a few months, they’ve turned into family.

It’s only a few times in your life where you meet someone and it’s instantly easy. It was easy when I met my best friend back on the first week of 10th grade and when I met my sorority sister turned real life sister-in-law in college. It was easy when I met my very best teacher friend on the first day of new teacher orientation my first year in Nashville and when we moved to Seattle where we found friends who we could make curry chicken tacos with on a Sunday afternoon in our pajamas. And lucky me, I found it again here in Minneapolis.

I’ve decided, as I get older, that I would way rather have a handful of friends that I can call no matter what, who can hang out on our couch and watch the Bachelorette or make biscotti with than a million acquaintances.

homemade Italian-style biscotti

My Minneapolis BFF and I had a cookie baking day last week where we used a ridiculous amount of butter and made a giant mess in my kitchen. Oh, and we made these biscotti.

These are a traditional Italian-style biscotti (adapted from Emiko Davies’ most recent book Torte Della Nonna), studded with toasted hazelnuts, clementine juice and zest, and big hunks of dark chocolate. They are super easy to adapt with whatever nut + citrus + chocolate combination you prefer and make a great Christmas cookie since they only get better as the days go by.

Like all Italian biscotti, these cookies are twice-baked. After mixing all of our wet and dry ingredients together into a fairly dense dough, we turn it out on a floured work surface and knead it a bit to make sure all of the flour bits are incorporated. Then we’ll sprinkle in our add-ins and knead it a bit more to ensure even distribution. The dough is then shaped into two rectangular logs, brushed with egg wash and baked until deeply golden brown. The logs cool for a few minutes and then we’ll use a sharp serrated knife to cut individual cookies. The long cookies are then baked again to ensure maximum crunchiness.

tips and substitutions

Maybe it’s the little Florida baby in me, but I love citrus season so much. There’s something about how in the darkest, coldest, parts of winter we get to reap the brightest bits of produce that just makes me giddy. I started seeing blood oranges and mandarins pop up in my grocery stores a few weeks ago, so you can bet that when I found a big bag of beautiful clementines, I jumped on it. You can easily substitute whatever citrus juice and zest looks the most exciting to you if you can’t find clementines.

I do have a small disclaimer about this recipe—slicing the biscotti will cause your chocolate to smear a bit. (This is why many biscotti recipes only incorporate nuts or dried fruits and then dip the cookies in chocolate after baking, but I really really wanted the chocolate scattered throughout). It’s inevitable that slicing the warm cookie log will cause the hot chocolate puddles to smear. I think it’s a small price to pay for having little pockets of chocolate studded throughout the final cookie, but if that really bothers you, you can absolutely omit the chocolate in the cookie dough and then melt your chocolate and dip your cooled cookies in it post-bake.