Chocolate Chip Cookies: Do you brown your butter?

Personally, I prefer my chocolate chip cookie recipe to be simple, efficient, and fast.  If I want a choco-chip cookie, there's no point to a lot of fuss - I want the cookie in my mouth!  While my usual go-to recipe has never failed me, I'd heard rumors of a better way to make a cookie: brown the butter!

Cook's Illustrated (always a tried and true source of kitchen know-how) decided early last year to improve their chocolate chip cookie recipe.  Among other things, they found that browning the butter yielded a cookie that tasted of caramel, almost like toffee!  This makes a dynamite paring with the chocolate in the cookie.  Properly browned butter - beurre noisette in French - takes on an almost hazelnut-like flavor.  The aroma is nutty, rich, and smooth all at once.

Since I prefer to keep my cookie recipe straight forward (i.e. I want to eat it asap!), I decided to adapt my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (found here) with this new technique.  The results were astonishing!  I literally laughed - cookie in mouth - because it tasted so.good.  The best part?  (After eating the cookie, of course.)  My cookie recipe was almost easier to make!  I didn't have to bother with softening the butter, since I was melting and browning it anyways!

Do you brown the butter for your chocolate chip cookies?


Related: Bakers Tricks: Browning the Butter