These brown butter bourbon chocolate chip cookies are unique and oh so gourmet! They have a thick, chewy texture and are scooped large for a bakery-style look. A splash of bourbon, melty chopped chocolate, and flaky sea salt all take them over the top!

Chocolate Chip Cookies With Bourbon & Brown Butter

Nutty brown butter, warm bourbon, rich chocolate, and just a hint of sea salt–have I piqued your interest yet?! These brown butter bourbon chocolate chip cookies are the boozy cousin to my brown butter chocolate chip cookies and elevate a household staple (talking about the butter, not the bourbon 😉) into something extraordinary. If you are looking for a dessert that’s simple, familiar, but also a bit edgy and more interesting, you’ve officially found it!

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

• No chilling or mixer needed. Since we are starting with melted brown butter, the dough comes together easily without the need for a mixer. And while the dough doesn’t need to chill before baking (yay!), you will need to wait a *little* bit for the butter to cool down before you can move on to the next steps of the recipe.
• Unique and fun, but also crowd-pleasing. Similar to my black bottom cookies, these cookies stand out in a crowd and yet they are also incredibly crowd-pleasing. The bourbon is unexpected but fits in seamlessly, the nutty brown butter adds a familiar coziness, and the chocolate chip cookie base is something everyone can get behind!
• Gourmet taste & appearance, yet still very approachable. The sweet caramel and vanilla notes of bourbon pair beautifully with classic chocolate chip cookies. These cookies taste fancy enough to impress just about anyone, and with their sea salted, melty pools of chocolate, they look straight from a bakery. At the same time, they are still very easy to make without any complicated techniques, tools, or hard-to-find ingredients.

Ingredients

• Bourbon. Use your favorite! I’ve used the brand shown above as well as Jim Beam, but really any kind of bourbon that you enjoy drinking will work.
• Dark brown sugar. The deeper, more molasses-y flavor of dark brown sugar really pairs well with the caramel notes of the bourbon. If you don’t have dark brown sugar on hand but you do have granulated sugar and molasses, you can actually save a trip to the store and make it yourself, see my post on how to make brown sugar.
• Egg + egg yolk. Bourbon adds extra moisture to the dough, if we don’t accommodate for that, we’ll end up with cakey or even dry cookies (a problem with many pumpkin cookies). We account for the extra moisture by eliminating the second egg white and instead use just the egg yolk.
• Semi-sweet chocolate bar. While chocolate chips will work fine (you would want to use 1 ½ cups), I prefer a chopped chocolate bar for a more gourmet experience (just like in my double chocolate chunk cookies!). Dark chocolate would be excellent here too!
• Sea salt. The combo of salty and sweet just works well with the bourbon and brown butter flavors, don’t skip it.

This is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!

SAM’S TIP: Room temperature eggs will incorporate best. If you forget to set yours out ahead of time, follow my trick to quickly bring eggs to room temperature.

How to Make Them

Brown the Butter

Melt the butter over medium low heat in a light colored saucepan. Increase the heat to just above medium, and cook, stirring constantly, as the butter pops and foams. Once the popping and foaming slows down, keep a close eye as you look for browned milk solids forming on the bottom of the pan. Once you see quite a bit of browning happening (as shown above!), remove the pan from the heat to prevent any burning.

Pour the brown butter into a heatproof bowl and add your bourbon. I cannot overstate how incredibly important it is that you let the butter cool down (completely!) before adding your sugars; if you don’t you’ll be left with a greasy dough that spreads all over your baking pans.

Make the Dough

Once your butter has completely cooled (it doesn’t need to be re-solidified, but it shouldn’t be at all warm), stir in your sugars. Add the eggs and vanilla, then set this aside.

Whisk the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl. Grab your butter mixture and gradually add the dry ingredients until everything is completely combined and the dough is cohesive. Fold in the chopped chocolate or chocolate chips.

Bake

Scoop the dough into large balls and roll them so they bake nice and uniform. Bake until the edges begin to turn a light golden brown.

Sprinkle the cookies with sea salt immediately after removing from the oven. They will be very fragile when warm, so let them cool completely on their baking sheet before enjoying.

SAM’S TIP: The longer these cookies sit, the better they taste. I actually like them even more the second day!

Frequently Asked Questions