Compliance, technically

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That felt like a waste of a good page name. So here is an actual cookie recipe. It's the one I bring to trailheads, and it's genuinely good.

Makes 24 · about 70 minutes

Brown Butter Chocolate Chip

Ingredients

1 cup (226 g) unsalted butter
2¼ cups (280 g) all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
¾ tsp kosher salt
1 cup (200 g) dark brown sugar, packed
½ cup (100 g) granulated sugar
2 large eggs + 1 yolk
2 tsp vanilla extract
12 oz (340 g) dark chocolate, chopped into shards, not chips
Flaky sea salt, to finish

Yield · 24375°F / 190°C

Method

Brown the butter. Medium heat, light-colored pan, 6 to 8 minutes, until it smells like toffee and the milk solids go deep gold. Scrape every bit into a bowl. Cool 15 minutes, hot butter scrambles eggs.
Whisk the dry. Flour, baking soda, kosher salt, separate bowl.
Build the base. Whisk both sugars into the cooled butter, then the eggs, yolk, and vanilla. Keep going until it's glossy. This is where chew comes from.
Combine. Fold in the dry just until it disappears, then the chocolate. Stop mixing.
Chill. 30 minutes minimum. Overnight is noticeably better and I know you won't.
Bake. 3-tablespoon balls, plenty of room, 11 to 13 minutes. Pull them when the edges are set and the middles still look wrong.
Finish. Flaky salt immediately, then leave them on the pan 10 minutes to set. Non-negotiable.

At altitude

Above about 3,000 ft, cookies spread too fast and dry out. Add 2 tbsp more flour, drop the granulated sugar by 2 tbsp, raise the oven to 400°F, and pull them a minute earlier. Above 7,000 ft, add a second tablespoon of flour and accept that baking at a hut is a compromise anyway.

Relocated as a courtesy

A Long Story About Me

Internet law requires every recipe to be preceded by several paragraphs about the author. I've moved mine below the recipe, because I respect you.

I started making these in a kitchen in Washington, DC, during four years at Rocket Money, where the job was convincing several million people a subscription was worth paying for. Premium membership went from 1.5 million to over 4 million paying members while I was there. Amplitude gave me an award for it called Revenue Monster, a phrase I have never once said out loud without smiling.

The recipe moved west with me. These days I'm a senior product manager at Citizen Health in San Francisco, building an AI assistant for people navigating rare disease, which mostly means reading an unreasonable number of transcripts to make sure it tells them the truth about their own medical records. It is the most consequential thing I've worked on, and the only product where I've genuinely lost sleep over a wrong answer.

The high-altitude notes came from actually testing them at altitude, which is roughly how I do product work too: ship it, watch it fail somewhere specific, write down exactly why, fix that.

Anyway. That's the story. If you'd like to talk about product roles, AI evaluation, or whether browning the butter justifies the second pan, jakeheller@gmail.com. The less charming version has dates and bullet points.