Preparations

• The order and temperature of your ingredients matters here. Everything except the butter (which gets browned and used hot) should be at room temperature. This is important for the final texture.
• Start the day before you want to bake your cookies, for perfect flavor and texture. You’ll thank me later.
• Line a sheet pan with baking parchment.
• Get all your ingredients ready.
• Chop the chocolate into chunks. Mine where about 1/4 in/0.5 cm. Maybe a tiny bit bigger. Put about 12-18 nice pieces of each type to the side, to top the cookies later. Keep all those lovely tiny chocolate shavings in the mix for the dough. They create a sort of chocolate marbling in the cookies.

Brown The Butter

• In a saucepan, melt your butter over medium high heat until it starts to wildly bubble. Stir the whole time, to get even browning. A silicone spatula is best, as it gets all those lovely brown bits from the bottom of the pan.
• When the bubble sizes and sounds start to change, lower the heat to medium low and keep stirring until it smells deliciously nutty and has a deep amber brown. Immediately transfer to your mixing bowl and add both sugars. Briefly stir, then allow to sit for about 5 minutes.
• This step, using still liquid butter, is the main difference between my recipe and most classic cookie recipes. Plus the lack of baking powder, which allow the cookies to spread despite the rather absorbent protein powder.
• Do not skip the browning, as that will keep too much water in the dough. Plus, that nutty flavor is amazing!

Mix The Wet Ingredients and Protein

• After the roughly 5 minutes have passed, start whisking the butter and sugar for a minute or so, until they look like very wet sand.
• Add the vanilla extract and egg and whisk for another 2 minutes (longer by hand) until the mix looks creamy, but not very fluffy. You don’t want to incorporate a lot of air into the dough, or the cookies will puff rather than ripple.
• Now add the protein and mix until incorporated, followed by the sourdough discard. Go gentle here with the stirring.

Fold In The Dry Ingredients and Chocolate Chunks

• Either in a separate bowl or on top of your batter, stir together the flour, salt and baking soda. Gently fold into the cookie dough. Don’t overmix, to prevent tough, rubbery cookies.
• Finally tumble in the chocolate pieces and fold them in too.

Scoop Your Sourdough Discard Cookie Dough

• Grab your parchment lined sheet pan and cookie scoop and portion out about 12 cookie dough balls.
• For now they can be all on one sheet pan, as it needs to go in the fridge overnight.
• But just one more step first: Get the chocolate pieces you put aside earlier and top each cookie with 2-3 of them. Then sprinkle with a little bit of flaky sea salt if you like.

Store The Dough In The Fridge Overnight

• Cover with cling film and refrigerate overnight. This step is critical for both flavor and shape.
• It allows the butter to firm up, the sugar to partially re-crystallize and the flavor to develop. There is a huge difference in the taste of a non-developed cookie and one that was allowed to spend the night hanging out in the fridge. And that’s not just with sourdough.
• Once they are cool, you could also freeze the cookie dough balls in freezer bags and bake them whenever the protein cookie craving hits.

Bake Your Rippled Sourdough Discard Protein Chocolate Chip Cookies

• Pre-heat your oven to 350°F/175°C.
• Line a second sheet pan with baking parchment.
• Transfer 6 of your cookie dough balls onto the second sheet pan with plenty of space between them and space out the ones on the first one. They spread a lot.
• Put ideally one at a time into the oven, for perfect results.
• Bake for about 5-6 minutes or until the outsides have spread out a bit and you see still a very unbaked “blob” in the center. Using oven mitts, take the tray out of the oven and firmly pan-bang it on your counter 2-3 times, until you see the center collapse and a ripple form on the outsides.
• Rotate and put them back into the oven for another 5-8 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown, while the center is still slightly underbaked.
• This is the secret to the perfect fudgy middle of chocolate chip cookies. They will continue to bake outside the oven for a few minutes. If they are not rippled enough yet or have a very puffy center, bang the pan again when taking them out.

Optional Step: The Cookie “Scoot”

• If you’d like perfectly round (and even more rippled) cookies, grab that large cookie cutter while they are still hot and soft. It should be slightly bigger than your biggest cookie.
• Holding the hot pan with a towel or oven mitt, pop the cutter over each cookie and rapidly move in circles, until your cookie looks perfect.
• Sprinkle with a little more sea salt if you like and allow to cool on the sheet pan for at least 10 minutes, so they can finish baking. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
• Enjoy your sourdough discard chocolate chip cookies while still slightly warm with a cuppa or glass of milk, for the perfect melty chocolate puddles!