Cookies never get old.
These Oatmeal Brown Sugar Cookies are a delight worth adding to your repertoire of cookie recipes.
This recipe is from the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen Cookbook Shelf Love. The cookie is called Verena’s Road Trip Cookie in the book. It is a great cookbook full of recipies you can generally put together with ingredients you have on hand. Who doesn’t need those kinds of recipes now and again? The cookbook is available at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.
The special ingredient in this cookie recipe is the brown butter, an ingredient known as beurre Noisette in French cooking. Brown butter is a wonderful ingredient in lots of dishes–both sweet and savory. Martha Stewart calls the sauce “intoxicatingly fragrant and impossibly silky.” That is a pretty strong endorsement if you ask me.
So, what is brown butter? It is product of watchfully heating unsalted (sweet) butter until the Maillard (or browning) reaction occurs. The butter heats to the point that the water in it boils off and the milk solids in the butter sink to the bottom and, depending upon how long you cook the butter, turn shades of dark brown and develop a nutty flavor. This term, Maillard reaction, is named after a French scientist named Louis-Camille Maillard whose early 20th Century experiments explained the science of the process. The Maillard reaction occurs in the cooking of many foods other than butter including bread crusts, chocolate, meats, and coffee beans.
Here is the Oatmeal Brown Sugar Cookie recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.
This is a very rich cookie–the kind of cookie that you only need to eat one to be satisfied. OK…maybe two.
Oatmeal Brown Butter Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 C. unsalted butter (room temperature, cut into cubes)
- 3/4 C. plus 1 T. light brown sugar (packed)
- 6 T. granulated sugar
- 4 t. vanilla extract
- 2 C. rolled oats
- 1 2/3 C. oat bran
- 3/4 C. all-purpose flour
- 1 t. ground cinnamon
- 3/4 t. freshly-grated nutmeg
- 1/4 t. baking powder
- 1 t. baking soda
- 1 t. salt
- 1 1/3 C. raisins
- 1 large egg
Directions
- Step 1 Mix 6 T. butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla in a large bowl. Set aside.
- Step 2 Combine dry ingredients –rolled oats, oat bran, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder, baking soda, salt and raisins. Set aside.
- Step 3 Put your remaining butter into a pan and heat until the butter melts and bubbles. Continue cooking the butter until it begins to foam and the solids in the butter begin to brown. Whisk the butter as this happens.Watch the butter carefully during this step because the butter goes from brown to burned very quickly! Once the butter turns a deep brown color and takes on a nutty fragrance, remove the browned butter from the heat. Immediately, pour the butter over the cubed butter and sugars that you have measured into a bowl. Whisk until the ingredients are combined. Set the brown butter aside to cool slightly for about 10 minutes. Stir the butter a couple of times as it cools.
- Step 4 Whisk the egg into the browned butter.
- Step 5 Add the oat mixture to the butter mixture. Use a rubber spatula for this and stir until you have a soft cookie dough. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
- Step 6 Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Using a cookie scoop if you have it (or rolling in your hands) divide the chilled cookie dough into balls. (You should be able to get about 30 cookies.) Place the balls on a cookie sheet covered with a Silpat or parchment. Place the balls well apart on the cookie sheet (about 6-8 cookies per sheet).
- Step 7 Bake cookies in your oven or in a countertop oven for about 4-5 minutes at 375 degrees F. and then rotate the pan and bake for another 4-5 minutes. You want the edges of the cookies to begin browning and you want the center of the cookie to be puffy but a little under-baked. Remove the cookies from the oven and let them cool completely.
- Step 8 Cook’s Note: I found the freshly-baked and cooled cookies to be pretty crumbly. So, eating them immediately after cooling could be problematic. If you can’t wait, handle the newly-baked cookies carefully. As the cookies sit on the counter, they gradually firm up, however. The texture of the cookies is chewy and the flavor of the brown butter in the cookie is pretty wonderful.
