These cookies are on the verge of being an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink scenario – there is assam tea powder, miso paste, brown butter, and about four kinds of chocolate. As I was making these cookies, I started out with making a giant vat of brown butter, threw some miso into that, and as I was whipping that with my eggs and brown sugar, I saw a small container of assam tea powder that I was going to use for something else, and decided to throw those in as well. I was between either doing a milk tea-type of cookie or a miso-brown butter-chocolate chip situation, so I figured, why not just combine the two? For those of you who have never had assam tea, it is a black tea that has deep earthy and malty notes. It pairs gorgeously with chocolate, while miso milk tea is actually one of my personal favorite combinations, so it all does work in a very jumbled together way. The assam and miso both play off of the chocolate and brown butter in different ways – there is a fragrance from the tea and brown butter, the miso adds that salty contrast, while the four different kinds of chocolate(dark, milk, semi-sweet, and blonde), all compliment the assam and miso and it all somehow comes together. I usually don’t like to feature more than 3 ingredients in a dessert at the risk of everything overpowering one another, but this cookie is one of those rare exceptions, because the miso, brown butter, assam tea, and four kinds of chocolate all come together to just be a dessert flavor bomb of a cookie!

For the recipe itself, we start with brown butter. The trick behind making brown butter is to heat the butter low and slow until it begins to turn a brown color – it should smell kind of like how those yellow butterscotch candies in the cellophane wrappers tastes if that makes sense? One challenge with using brown butter in a cookie dough is that you usually want to start your cookie dough off by whipping cold butter so that it will aerate. Brown butter, freshly made, is a hot liquid. So you have two options: chill down the brown butter so that you can whip it, which takes time, or you can start by whipping sugar and eggs directly into the brown butter to bring down the temperature faster. I opted for the latter, since I refrigerated my cookie dough overnight anyways, and I did not want to extend the waiting time on this recipe more than needed. I usually add the chocolate last, after the flour, leaveners, and assam tea, to a recipe, since I do not want my chocolate chips to melt into the dough. Overall, for a cookie recipe, I would say that there is a little more technique involved, since you are making brown butter, and you are also moderating the temperature of the dough to avoid melting your chocolate into the dough prematurely, but the cookies themselves are delightful and one of my new personal favorites. They are very addicting!

For the dough:
2 sticks unsalted butter, browned
1 1/2 cups light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 tbsp white miso paste
3 tbsp assam tea powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup white chocolate chips
1/4 cup blonde chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup dark chocolate, coarsely chopped

In a mixing bowl, carefully whip the brown butter, brown sugar, granulated sugar, eggs, miso, tea powder, and vanilla together until combined. The brown butter, if freshly made, will be extremely hot, so if you need the hold the bowl at any point, please cover your hands to avoid burning them. In another bowl, sift the flour, baking soda, and baking powder together. Toss the chocolate into the flour mixture as well. Once the exterior of the brown butter bowl is no longer warm to the touch, fold the flour-chocolate mixture in to form your dough. Refrigerate the dough, covered, for at least 5 hours, before scooping out balls(roughly 3 tbsp per ball) of it. Place each dough ball about 2-inches apart from one another on a lined sheet tray. Then bake at 375 degrees F for 14 minutes, rotating the sheet trays halfway through the baking process to guarantee even baking.