These Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies are made with browned butter that’s been flavor boosted with milk powder. The browned butter gives them a perfectly nutty, toffee like flavor which is a perfect match to the toasted pecans and chocolate chips. They are soft and a bit chewy. Add a sprinkle of salt on top and you’ve got one delicious cookie!

You know I love a chocolate chip cookie with pecans. In one of my favorite recipes, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies, I always take some of the batter and add some toasted pecans. It just makes for a richer, more interesting cookie.

Now, didn’t just add pecans to my typical chocolate chip cookie recipe. I redeveloped the whole recipe. To start with, I reduced the amount of flour. I wanted a thinner cookie than I typically make, and I wanted more chew.

The biggest difference, though, was shifting to browned butter. I knew that browning the butter would add so much flavor to a pecan cookie.

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But I also wanted to boost that flavor with a little trick, adding dry milk powder! It’s the toasted milk solids in browned butter that add all that wonderful flavor.

I use Judee’s Whole Milk Powder {aff. link}, but you can use other nonfat dry milk powders. I just like to use full fat for baking.

Dry milk powders are a great thing to have on hand especially if you don’t keep fresh milk in the fridge.

Just an fyi…I also love using malted milk powder {aff. link} for other recipes where I’m not browning butter. I use it my Malted Milk Chocolate Chip Cookies and in my Big Batch Protein Pancakes. But, I digress. Back to the browned butter.

Adding milk powder increases the amount of milk solids. So, you get more toasty milk solids for the same amount of butter. More toasty milk solids equals more flavor. Here’s how you do it…

How to Brown Butter with Milk Powder

You need a light colored pan to brown butter. You need to be able to clearly see the color of your melted butter as it cooks.

You’ll start by melting the butter over medium heat. As soon as it’s melted, add the dry milk and whisk constantly.

The butter will foam up and you’ll see the milk solids collecting in the bottom of the pan. These are the solids from your butter as well as the solids you added from the dry milk powder.

As soon as you see the milk solids beginning to brown, remove the pan from the heat and continue whisking. The milk solids will continue to toast to a deep golden brown. This happens quickly. You don’t want your mixture to burn.

That’s it! Scrape them into a heat safe bowl and let them cool to room temperature.

I left them in the pan to cool because I planned to mix the cookie dough right in my saucier pan {aff. link} (a somewhat atypical use for it, but it worked well for me) to save myself another bowl to wash. So, you’ll see my saucier working as my mixing bowl in my photos.

Don’t let the pan throw you off. Just pretend it’s a mixing bowl :)

The photo above is just the cooled down browned butter mixture whisked together. This really illustrates the browned butter mixture. All those little toasty bits have now been mixed back into the fat.

Making the Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies

Once your butter is browned and cooled, it’s time to mix up the cookie dough. The great thing about using melted browned butter for your dough is that the recipe doesn’t require a mixer. It’s easily mixed up by hand.

Next, we simply follow the traditional cookie process of mixing the butter and sugars…whisk, whisk whisk…(I did add some additional softened butter at this step. Read on for more about that.)

Adding the egg, vanilla and some water….whisk, whisk, whisk…

And then finally adding in the dry ingredients that have already been whisked and set aside. Use a mixing spoon or rubber spatula for this step. We’re done with the whisk.

Alternatively, feel free to use an electric mixer to combine the ingredients.

But wait! Let me talk a bit about the two other ingredients I added that aren’t illustrated well in these photos.

I mentioned that I added some very soft butter when I added the sugars, and then some water when I added the egg and vanilla. I added a Tablespoon of each.

Now, why did I do that?

When you brown butter, water evaporates from the mixture. I like to add back the water that was lost along with an extra hit of fat. This helps bring the dough back to a moisture level that works well for this recipe.

Without it, the dough would be too dry. Dry cookies aren’t chewy. I wanted a chewy cookie.

Nuts seem to absorb moisture from the dough as well, and this dough has pecans, so between the extra butter and the water, I had my bases covered for a good dough.

(If you’ve ever made my Brown Sugar Butter Pecan Scones, you might remember that I added water to that dough as well to help counter act the addition of pecans.)

Adding the Chips and Nuts

I went with equal amount of pecans and chocolate chips. I did try a batch with more pecans, because really, I was thinking it’s all about the nuts…

But, I ended up reducing the nuts, increasing the chips and that worked out better for me.

Toasting the nuts is important. The flavor is so much better, so don’t skip that step.

Instead of chopping the nuts, I broke them into pieces by hand. I wanted chunks of nuts I could bite into, not tiny pieces. But you could also do a rough chop instead.

I decided to use Ghiradelli Bittersweet Chocolate Chips {aff. link} because I had a giant bag of them, but semisweet are also great. You can even go with milk chocolate, if you’d prefer the extra sweetness.

Why should you chill the cookie dough?

I know it’s not a popular step, but I really think it’s a good one for the best flavor. So plan ahead.

I chill the dough for two reasons:

One….a chilled dough will spread less. I didn’t want super flat cookies and this dough is soft from the melted browned butter. I wanted them to have some body to them.

Two….chilling the dough affects the flavor and texture. There’s science behind what happens to the flour and sugars while they hang out in the fridge. For the baking nerds, feel free to read more about that here.

How long should you chill the cookie dough?

I chill mine overnight, but you don’t have to chill it that long. If you truly can’t wait, I would chill it long enough for the fats to firm up, maybe an hour. Longer is better.

I really think the dough is better if chilled overnight. For those of you who need a longer chill time, you could chill it up to 72 hours before baking.

In the past, I used to either chill cookie dough after scooping, if it was firm enough, or just chill it in the bowl.

But, I decided to try something different this time. I scraped the dough out onto a sheet of plastic wrap and wrapped it up like I do when I chill my scones.

(Pet peeve…chilling cookie dough in the bowl and then being unable to scoop it until it is less chilly.)

Portioning Out the Dough

With the dough in a nice little disk, I decided to weigh out each portion by simply breaking off pieces of dough until I had a little under 2 ounces for each cookie.

Breaking off the dough was so easy! If you don’t have a scale, just score the chilled dough with a knife into 12 equal portions and use that as a guide.

Or, chill the dough in a log and cut even portions from that. I would still form them into a ball shape, though, to help them spread less than a sliced disk.

This will give you about one dozen cookies. I baked 6 to a half sheet pan.

Yes, you could use your cookie scoop and just scoop it out as well. Whatever works for you.

I didn’t plan to roll these into perfect dough balls, so weighing them worked perfectly for me. I just smushed the pieces of dough into a “ball shape.”

There was no rolling, no smooth exterior. Just rocky looking cookie dough balls. I wanted them to bake up with more texture.

Baking the Cookies

I baked the cookies at 350 for 10-15 minutes, until they were deeply golden around the edges and nicely golden on the top.

These cookies bake up darker than some of my other chip cookies, partially because of the browned butter and partially because of the overnight chill.

I’m not a fan of underbaked cookies. I like to hit the sweet spot of fully baked, but not overbaked. In my oven, that took almost 15 minutes.

Ovens vary so definitely start checking at the 10 minute mark.

My bake time was from a full chill. My dough did not sit out and come to room temperature while I was forming the balls. I quickly portioned the dough and baked the cookies.

If you decide to double the batch or only bake one pan at a time, I would keep the remaining dough in the fridge until you are ready to bake it.

As soon as they come out of the oven, sprinkle with flaky sea salt. I used fleur de sel {aff. link}.

Of course, the sprinkling of salt is optional, but I love how salt balances the sweet in these cookies. I also love salt with dark chocolate, so that’s a bonus as well.

Look at those deeply golden cookies! They are soft with a nice chew, and they are full of browned butter goodness.

The flavor is almost toffee like with lovely, buttery, caramel flavor notes. The sweet and salty combination is kind of addictive.

When I was testing the different batches, of course I had to taste them. I kept planning to eat only half a cookie. But, you know what they say about the best laid plans….

So make a plan! Mix up a batch today so that you can get that overnight chill done. Then, grab a glass of milk or beverage of choice and have yourself a cookie :)

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