Browned butter + roasted flour = baking magic?

Question

I love the flavour of browned butter, and I've tried baking sable cookies with roasted flour (delicious). Is there a good reason why, in a bog-standard chocolate chip cookie recipe which calls for melted butter, I could not use browned butter? Will the fats react differently in the baking process?

Answer 1

You can absolutely do this. I do it in brown-butter cornbread, for example. A good trick to boost the flavor even farther is to add non-fat milk powder to the butter as it browns, to supply even more protein for the Maillard reactions.

Answer 2

If your recipe calls for softened but not melted butter, make sure to cool the butter until it is softened again so that the air bubble network from the creaming method can re-form. The creaming method doesn't work with melted butter, browned or otherwise.

Using a tip from America's Test Kitchen I've also done cookies calling for softened butter with melted browned butter and two extra egg yolks, where this makes the cookies chewier and less cakey.