Best Kitchen Sink Cookies

These Best Kitchen Sink Cookies are gooey, fudgy, and made with brown butter for extra nuttiness and caramel notes. They’re loaded with chocolate chips, toffee bits, and potato chips for the perfect blend of sweet and slightly salty. 

If you search for “best cookie recipe” in Google, you’ll come across pages and pages of recipes all claiming to be the tastiest. We have no doubt that those other recipes out there are amazing too, but we’re partial to these cookies. They have just the right amount of chew and satisfy our craving for sweet and salty treats all in the same bite. 

We like our cookies to be fudgy and soft but not cakey, with a slightly crispy (almost caramelized) bottom, and these Kitchen Sink Cookies fit the bill nicely. They are also our most requested dessert, so we try to keep the ingredients on hand at all times.

What is Brown Butter?

If you’ve done some baking before, you may have come across recipes calling for “brown butter” or “browned butter.” They both refer to the same thing, which is butter that has been melted and cooked long enough that the milk solids turn brown. This happens when the water evaporates from the cooking process, and the leftover milk solids caramelize. 

Brown butter has a satisfyingly nutty flavor and smell and it adds caramel undertones to baked goods, like these cookies.

How to Brown Butter

First, you’ll want to start with unsalted butter. This is pretty controversial for us, because we almost always use salted butter. It’s just better. But when it comes to browning butter, the salt can cause the butter to foam up more when you’re melting it, making it harder to see when the milk solids are browning. This can make it much easier to overcook the butter and turn it into burnt butter instead of brown. 

Once you have your unsalted butter (we prefer using Kerrygold, but any good unsalted butter will do), you will need to brown it according to the steps below. 

1. Melt butter in a pot over medium heat, stirring constantly. 
2. Reduce the heat to medium-low when the butter starts to bubble, then cook for another 5 to 7 minutes until the butter has turned golden-to-medium brown in color and smells nutty (if it smells burnt, you’ve gone to far). 

Chilling the Brown Butter for Best Results

When we tested this recipe, we wanted to make sure we got the best results possible with the brown butter. In our experience, brown butter works best in cookies if you take it from the hot temperature it is after melting and cool it down again. 

To do this, you can either refrigerate the butter until it’s cold, or you can use our preferred method, which is much quicker. 

1. Place the pot of brown butter inside a bowl that has been filled with enough ice to cover the bottom of the bowl, but not too much that the ice spills over. 
2. Using a whisk, stir the butter while the pot sits in the bowl of ice until the butter is thicker and slightly cool but still soft. 
3. You’ll be left with butter that is now less brown in color due to the air whipped in it, but it will still have speckles of caramelized milk solids. 
4. If the butter is firm, you’ve gone too far and will need to let it rest at room temperature before using it. 

Ingredients for the Kitchen Sink Cookies

Aside from the brown butter, the rest of this cookie recipe is pretty straightforward. You’ll need:

• All-purpose flour – we measure our flour using the spoon and level method when we develop baking recipes, so it’s really important that you do the same or your cookies won’t turn out right. For the spoon and level method of measuring, spoon flour into the measuring cup and then level it off instead of scooping the flour with the measuring cup. Spooning and leveling reduces the amount of flour used by almost a quarter cup, so you definitely want to use this method. Alternatively, you can weigh your flour instead (we use about 280 grams in this recipe).
• Unsalted butter – as we mentioned above, unsalted butter is better than salted in this recipe because of how it browns. 
• Sugar – we use both granulated and brown sugar in this recipe as they each react differently and help give these cookies their signature texture and flavor.
• Eggs – eggs provide lift and richness to these cookies.
• Salt – we always add salt to our baked goods, even when we use salted butter. But because we’re using unsalted butter here, you’ll need even more salt to balance out all of the sweetness.
• Vanilla – this helps add even more caramelly undertones to the cookies. 
• Baking soda – the baking soda reacts with the acidity of the brown sugar to help provide just the right amount of rise when these cookies are baking.
• Sweet and salty mix-ins – everything but the kitchen sink, right? To achieve this, we use milk chocolate chips, toffee bits (we use Heath brand), and crushed potato chips (Ruffles work best, in our experience) as mix-ins.

How to Make The Best Kitchen Sink Cookies

Other than the brown butter, these cookies are fairly standard and easy to make.

Preparation

To make these cookies, first preheat your oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. 

All About the Butter

Make the brown butter by melting it a pot over medium heat, stirring constantly. Reduce the heat to medium-low when the butter starts to bubble, then cook for another 5 to 7 minutes until the butter is browned and smells nutty. 

Chill the butter slightly in the fridge or place the pot in a bowl of ice and stir the butter with a whisk to cool it slightly (this is our preferred method).

The Dry and Wet Ingredients

Mix the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt) together in a bowl and set aside.

In a separate large mixing bowl, add the butter and both sugars and mix together with a whisk, spoon, or electric beater. Mix in the eggs and the vanilla. 

Add the dry ingredients to the bowl with the wet ingredients and mix them in until just combined. Try not to overmix or the cookies might become gummy. Then fold in the chocolate chips, toffee chips, and potato chips. 

Shaping and Baking the Best Kitchen Sink Cookies

For large cookies, which is how we like to make them, scoop about 3 tbsp of dough per cookie. This recipe should make about 16 large cookies. 

Spread out 4 to 6 cookie dough balls onto the prepared baking sheet. Press a couple more chocolate chips and crushed potato chips onto the tops of each dough ball so that they’ll bake into the tops. 

Bake the cookies for about 10 minutes or until the edges look golden brown and cookies look fudgy and slightly not set in the middle. They’ll continue to cook for a few minutes after they come out of the oven. If you want, you can bang the cookies on the counter once or twice to get them to deflate and wrinkle a bit, but in our experience, they do this naturally on their own when they start to cool. 

While the cookies are still warm, place an inverted glass or biscuit cutter over each one and move it in a circular motion to shape each cookie into a perfect circle. This will also help the cookies get some wrinkles and extra chewiness. 

Let the cookies rest for a few minutes, then move them to a rack to cool completely. For extra sweet and salty vibes, top with flaky sea salt (optional). 

Important note: you’ll be tempted to eat these cookies warm, they actually taste better and more toffee-like after they’ve cooled. Trust us.