My dulce de leche cookie is the most flavorful chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever tasted. Mixing dulce de leche with browned butter directly into the cookie dough creates a deeply nutty cookie that is toasted through every bite. And because of the high protein content of dulce de leche, no eggs are needed in this recipe.

Dulce de leche is one of my favorite “secret” ingredients to use in baking. It’s a gift from the Latin kitchen gods, and think of it as the MSG for baking, enhancing everything it touches. The Spanish translation is “candy [made] of milk” or “sweet [made] of milk,” and it is often described as a milk-based caramel, but the flavor is predominantly from the Maillard reaction. And when used in a chocolate chip cookie, it deepens the roasted nutty milk flavors, unlike any other ingredient.

What is the flavor and texture of the dulce de leche chocolate chip cookie?

Most chocolate chip cookies aim for a toffee-like flavor, achieved through protein browning via the Maillard reaction. This reaction occurs minimally on the cookie’s exterior, where high heat is concentrated during baking. Baking soda accelerates the Maillard reaction, which is why it’s a common ingredient in cookie recipes. 

Using dulce de leche in cookies is the ultimate shortcut to achieving an intense toasted toffee flavor. Unlike regular chocolate chip cookies, which develop toffee notes mainly through baking, dulce de leche infuses every bite with deep, roasted milk-toffee richness before the cookies even hit the oven.

Texturally, this cookie is very chewy. There are no crispy tops or edges on this one. Once it comes out of the oven, it's super soft, and as it cools, it gets this awesome chewy texture. I love it.

You’ll want to make these if you prefer a cookie that:

• is intensely nutty and toasted flavored with dulce de leche and browned butter; 
• is ultra chewy throughout the whole cookie; and 
• tastes sweet from the caramel notes of the dulce de leche and dark brown sugar. 

What is dulce de leche?

A direct translation from Spanish reads that dulce de leche is: "candy [made] of milk" or "sweet [made] of milk." It’s sometimes also referred to as a caramel, but the process by which dulce de leche gets its flavor is predominantly from the Maillard reaction, not caramelization. Though I can understand the term, because it does have a caramel-like texture and flavor. 

To make it, sweetened condensed milk (usually just milk plus white sugar) is heated for a prolonged period. This cooking process changes many characteristics of the condensed milk in terms of color, texture and flavor. 

What kind of dulce de leche can you use in this recipe?

So far, I’ve tested 5 types of dulce de leche that are available to me here in the US. They are:

1. Homemade dulce de leche (using canned sweetened condensed milk from Kirkland Signature or Eagle brands)
2. Nestle La Lechera (from a squeeze bottle)
3. Nestle La Lechera (from a can)
4. La Serenísima Dulce de Leche (I had to order from Amazon)
5. Amorcito Corazón - Cajeta 

So which one should you use?

These dulce de leches worked in my recipe except for the cajeta. (The cajeta likely had a different sugar content or type, which led to my cookies spreading and bubbling into blobby shapes.)

You can’t go wrong with picking any of these; all yield a fantastically flavorful cookie. My notes are: 

Homemade dulce de leche tastes the best of all of these; when baked in a cookie, it only slightly increases in flavor compared to the commercial brands.

If you do decide to make homemade dulce de leche from condensed milk, it has to be a method where the moisture content remains the same throughout the cooking process. This means no water evaporation can occur, so the container must be closed throughout the heating process. I use a jar in a pressure cooker, and some bakers like to boil cans or use that in a pressure cooker. The oven method won’t work. I don’t yet have a dedicated post on that subject, but I will try soon.

La Serenísima is a notch ahead in terms of flavor and texture (super creamy!) for commercial brands. 

Nestle La Lechera is more readily available locally, so I use it most often; my husband loved the canned dulce de leche cookies in my taste tests. 

What ingredients do you need for dulce de leche chocolate chip cookies?

Unsalted butter is the primary source of fat in this recipe. It’s also browned, which is a process that heats the butterfat to a high enough temperature to toast the milk solids. Butter is a magical ingredient that contains all the necessary components for the Maillard reaction, which requires proteins and sugars to produce these toasty aromatic compounds. Also, it’s not just the toasted milk solids that are the flavor; during the Maillard reaction, many aromatic compounds are created, and some only dissolve in fats. So, cooking these milk proteins in the butterfat creates a flavorful liquid that coats every bite of this cookie with roasty, toasty goodness.

I also use unsalted butter in most baking applications because it varies in salt concentration and is used in large quantities, making your recipes overly salty.

Dulce de leche is sweetened condensed milk cooked over a prolonged period containing sugars and milk proteins. This changes the flavor, color, and texture of the condensed milk. The flavor is deeply complex, with notes of caramel, nuttiness, and toasted goodness from both the Maillard and caramelization reactions. This changes the color, which can vary from a tan to a deep brown. 

Brown sugar supplements the dulce de leche sugar, which is the primary source in this recipe. The brown sugar adds a bit of molasses to the cookie, giving it a deeper flavor and darker color. I initially wrote this recipe to use dark brown sugar, but it seems as though different brands vary in their molasses concentrations, which can cause the cookies to spread a tad too much. Use light brown sugar in this recipe unless you have C&H sugar, in which case you can use either light or dark. 

Water is added to replace the water lost during the browning process. The final cookie becomes a little too dry without adding this small amount to the cookie dough. 

Vanilla extract and salt are the flavoring enhancers.

Baking soda is an alkaline powder that does a couple of things. It reacts with acidic ingredients in recipes (in this case, brown sugar) to create carbon dioxide gas, which expands tiny air bubbles and gives a slightly aerated texture. It has a greater effect, however, on the browned exterior of the cookie. Baking soda increases the rate of the Mailliard reaction, which is the browning and toasting that occurs between sugars and proteins when exposed to heat. 

All-purpose (or plain) flour is the starch in this recipe and gives the cookie structure. You can use bleached or unbleached flour, but I use unbleached in all my recipes as I prefer the flavor. 

‍Chocolate chips and chunks add bulk and structure to the finished cookie. This recipe uses half chocolate chips and half chocolate chunks from a solid bar. 

Chocolate chips come in many varieties, but for the most part, these chocolates are manufactured with a special formulation of fats (instead of just pure cocoa butter) that helps the chips retain a classic “drop” shape even after high baking temperatures. This also makes them slightly cheaper than real chocolate products. I like to use semi-sweet chips from Costco in my cookies.

For chocolate chunks, you’ll need a bar that will be chopped into ¼-inch chunks. This type of chocolate melts more easily at baking temperatures because of its cocoa butter content. This melts into irregular globs within the cookie dough, but upon cooling, these globs will solidify, creating delicious creamy pockets of chocolatey goodness. The type of chocolate is purely your preference, but I usually combine milk and dark chocolates. My favorite kind of chocolate bar comes from Trader Joe’s.

This recipe benefits from using an additional ingredient source that undergoes the Maillard reaction. The cookie with just chocolate is already spectacular, but if you’re really trying to impress, I’d sub in half of the chocolate chips for one of these ingredients:

All of these ingredients have undergone the Maillard reaction or caramelization already and is a super easy way to create flavor complexity that aligns with the triple browned butter flavor in this cookie. 

1. Caramelized white chocolate: I use Cupcake Jemma’s microwave method (her YouTube video is here) and chop the set chocolate into chunks.
2. Toffee chunks: You can either make your own toffee or use chopped up Heath bars, like I show above.
3. Pecans: Be sure to roast them to get the full flavors from the Maillard reaction, then chop them into pieces.
4. Pretzels: The signature brown crust on a pretzel is from the Maillard reaction, usually from dipping the pretzels in an alkaline bath prior to baking. Chop them up before adding to the batter. 
5. Caramel chips: These are hard to source nowadays, but worth it if you can find them. I get mine at Trader Joe’s during the holiday season and buy several bags to last me throughout the next year.

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Is this an egg-free chocolate chip cookie recipe?

This recipe does not require eggs. In most chocolate chip cookies, eggs generally provide two major functions: structure (via proteins) and moisture (via water). This recipe contains a high ratio of dulce de leche, which includes various things, including a good amount of milk-based protein. And we’ll add a tiny bit of water for what the eggs usually provide.

My current understanding of how this works is that during dulce de leche heating, there is some gelation (proteins sticking together) of the milk proteins. (That’s why sometimes, when you make the homemade versions, they seem curdled right after baking.) I believe this is able to hold the cookies together in a way that may be similar to egg proteins. It’s a little different, which is why these cookies have a chewier texture. But I’m learning more every day about the applicability of this process it’s enough structure for the final baked cookie. So yeah, egg-free cookies!