Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1. 1Melt the butter in a light-coloured pan over a medium heat and keep cooking it. It will foam, then quieten, then the milk solids at the bottom will turn golden and smell of toffee and nuts — about 5–7 minutes. Pour it at once into a bowl, scraping in every brown speck, and let it cool until barely warm.
2. 2Whisk both sugars into the cooled butter, then the eggs, extra yolk and vanilla. Beat for a full minute, until it thickens and loses its graininess. Browning the butter drove off water, and the extra yolk puts back the richness that lost.
3. 3Fold in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and fine salt until barely combined, then the chopped chocolate. Chopping rather than using chips gives you shards and pools rather than uniform buttons.
4. 4Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, ideally overnight. The flour hydrates, the dough firms up so the cookies spread less, and the flavour deepens noticeably. This is the step that matters most.
5. 5Heat the oven to 180°C fan. Scoop 60 g balls onto lined trays, leaving a good 6 cm between them — they spread more than you expect.
6. 6Bake for 11–13 minutes. Pull them when the edges are set and browned but the centres still look slightly underdone and puffed. They carry on cooking on the hot tray, and this is the difference between chewy and crisp.
7. 7Bang the tray once on the worktop as it comes out to collapse the centres into ripples, scatter with flaky salt, and cool on the tray for 10 minutes before moving them.

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