Sunday, September 14, 2014 – When I first started learning how to bake, I learned that you should never melt the butter, that if you’re using butter, the creaming method is king.
Since then, a few of my coworkers and a few of my friends have mentioned melting the butter. One of my friends even mentioned browned butter. (Nope, it’s just brown sugar.) Serious Eats famous cookie article (the one that I’ve been linked to by 4 different people) swears by browned butter. So I decided to finally give it a try.
The first thing to note is that browning the butter takes more time than creaming the butter. I timed browning the butter. It took 23 minutes to brown the butter (and this was from the butter hitting the pan to the water boiling off to the first specks of brown showing up), and then I had to wait even longer for the butter to come back to room temperature (lest I curdle the eggs by mixing them with a hot butter/sugar mixture). As opposed to creaming the butter, which takes less than 5 minutes.
It did make mixing easier though. With the butter melted, I didn’t need my stand mixer to do the heavy lifting. (Err, mixing.)
I chose to make the cookies without any chocolate chips, and instead of all brown sugar, I used half brown and half white. This was to give the browned butter flavor a chance to shine through.
Texture-wise, the cookies were slightly stiffer, probably because I boiled away all the moisture in the butter and didn’t replace any of it. There were a few brown specks in my cookies, presumably specks of the browned milk proteins from browning the butter.
Taste-wise, though, it was a bit of a disapointment. Don’t get me wrong, browned butter is awesome, and browned-butter-based sauces are even more awesome. But when you take browned butter and bake it into a cookie, the flavor gets really subdued. Sure, the flavor is different, but I’m not sure if it’s better, and it’s certainly not good enough to spend all that extra time browning the butter when I have a perfectly cromulent creamed butter recipe.
I’ll prolly A/B test this in the future and see what people’s preferences are.
The word “brown” comes up way too often in this post.