Ingredients for perfect chocolate chip cookies.

You’re only as good as your ingredients. We recommend you splurge for all of the ingredients below to ensure you get a gourmet chocolate chip cookie.

Unsalted Butter: Using unsalted butter means that you can fully control the amount of salt going into your cookies and also ensures that it browns evenly. You’ll brown the butter for a nutty, toasty deep flavor as the base for your cookies!
Sugar: Chocolate chip cookies should always be made with a mixture of brown and white sugar
Eggs: Eggs will bind your cookies together. A single egg and one egg yolk will gives these cookies their soft, chewy, not too cakey texture.

Vanilla Extract: Do NOT leave out the vanilla.

Flour: All purpose flour is our flour of choice for these chewy cookies. It creates a tender but hearty crumb. Make sure when you are measuring your flour you measure it carefully using a spoon to aerate the flour. We recommend adding the first cup in and then adding the remaining 3/4 cup a little at a time. Browned butter evaporates as it browns, meaning that the amount of butter can vary depending on how long you browned it for which can lead to less liquid in your cookie dough. See the directions for more guidance on this!
Chocolate Chips: When it comes to chocolate chip cookies, your chocolate can make or break your cookie. Splurge on a high quality semi sweet or dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is child’s play. So are the store brand chocolate chips. Go for a good bar, chocolate disks, or a high quality chunk. Whatever you choose, use 2 cups of it and load up your cookie dough for big, melty pools of chocolate throughout your cookie.
Salt: Baked goods NEED salt. Without it they’re just cloyingly sweet. Salt adds that perfectly nuanced salty-sweet flavor that pushes a baked good from good to great.
chocolate chip cookie dough balls

How to make brown butter:

If you haven’t had brown butter yet, you MUST try it. Browning your butter gives it an amazing complexity that enhances so many recipes.

Start by melting your butter over medium heat in a small sauce pan.
Whisk the butter constantly as it melts to ensure it’s evenly heated. As it melts the butter will start to foam. This is the sweet point between boiling the butter (NOT what you want) and not hot enough.
Keep a close eye on the butter. Like DO NOT WALK AWAY. As it transitions from it’s usual yellow color to a deeper golden hue and at last to a beautiful light brown. You’ll know it’s done by the smell: a toasted, nutty, intoxicating scent. It can very quickly go from this light brown to burnt, so make sure you take it off the heat as soon as it makes the turn.
Take it off the heat and transfer to a bowl to allow it to cool before using in your recipe.
chocolate chip cookie dough on baking sheet

The Three Don’ts of Chocolate Chip Cookie Baking

There are a million tips for the best chocolate chunk cookies, but these three will pretty much make or break your cookie, so start taking notes.

Don’t you dare forget the salt and the vanilla: These two ingredients make or break a cookie. Get the good vanilla and the flaky sea salt. It will be well worth it.
Don’t over mix: Repeat after me, “overmixing ruins everything.” I know it can be fun to whisk away and overwork your dough as an excuse to eat more cookie dough, but do not do it. You will get dry, tough, sad cookies.
Don’t over bake: In fact, when in doubt UNDER bake. The cookies will continue to bake as they cool. Plus, no one ever complained about a gooey center 🙂

How to Store Chocolate Chip Cookies

Can you make chocolate chip cookies ahead? How to freeze these best chocolate chip cookies? All your questions answered below!
These chewy chocolate chip cookies are best freshly baked. These are not the cookies I would recommend sending in the mail to a friend, or baking a few days before the party you’re bringing them to. They will last in a sealed container for 3 days, but definitely start tasting a little stale after day 2.

Our advice? If you want to prep ahead, make the dough in advance and scoop out balls of cookie dough. Place the cookie dough in a freezer plastic bag and freeze the cookie dough for up to 3 months for whenever you want fresh baked cookies!