It has been awhile (almost two months???) since I’ve last updated this blog. So here I go.

I’ve eaten a lot of chocolate chip cookies in my lifetime—ones that friends’ made, ones that I’ve made, ones that I’ve bought from the store. Everyone seems to have their own go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe, the one they insist is the best. Even a short Google search into chocolate chip cookie recipes, you’ll find recipes either titled or included in their description of something along the likes of, “the best chocolate chip cookies you’ll ever make.” But what does it mean to be the best chocolate chip cookie? To determine the one true recipe (in a sample size of five) that stands out above the rest (again, of a sample size of five) as well as what people look for in their perfect cookie, I did a chocolate chip cookie battle by testing out five different recipes and forcing my roommates to blind taste-test them for me.

I took a significant amount of inspiration from PancakePrincess’s bakeoff, though I didn’t go as hard as she did and made 12 different batches of chocolate chip cookies.

After doing some asking around, I settled on five to try, mostly on what other people suggested and one of which I wanted to try/re-try.

• AllRecipes
• Nestle Tollhouse
• CH Cookie
  • An original creation, a supposedly legendary cookie passed down class by class and held in reverence by the bros at my church.
• The Food Lab Cookie
• Bravetart Cookie

Methodology

So understood that I was about to have a lot of cookies on my hands if I do this. Knowing this, I tried to stream-line the process by making some guidelines.

• All recipes would be cut in half.
• If a recipe lists a cup-measure of flour, to be as objective as possible, such flour measures were converted to weight-measures, according to the King Arthur flour cup gram conversion number, which is 120 grams of flour in a cup.
• For all recipes that called for brown sugar, light brown sugar was used.
• Semi-sweet Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chips and bars were used, unless specified otherwise in the recipe.
• Morton kosher salt was used in every recipe, converted to 1/2 amt called for in the recipe.
• All recipes, with the exception of The Food Lab Cookie (which had a chill period), were made in the same afternoon.

It was a bit of work to organize what I needed in each recipe, as you can see down here. Again, taking a page from PancakePrincess’s book, I organized a nice spreadsheet to compare all five recipes.

For the most part for each of these recipes, the steps are the same of mixing dry and wet ingredients and folding in chocolate in the end and baking it for roughly ~10 minutes at an average oven temperature of ~350F. The differences in the recipes lie in other small aspects such as amounts used, chilling steps being employed, additional ingredients being used, or browning butter or not.

One other thing that I was surprised by was that the ingredient ratios for each cookie was surprisingly not too far off. There were no outliers. I examined the composition (by grams) of the cookies for each recipe by breaking it down to its main ingredients–flour, granulated sugar, brown sugar, butter, and chocolate. As you can see in the chart below, they’re not too different. There’s a clear trend.

What makes a cookie? Well, according to this sample size of five, it’s:

1. Chocolate: 23-29%
2. Butter: 16-23%
3. Brown Sugar: 14-18%
4. Granulated Sugar: 10-14%
5. Flour: 23-27%

A standard cookie recipe is roughly 25% flour, 25% chocolate, 20% butter, 12% granulated sugar, and 18% brown sugar. Other ingredients like baking soda, salt, or vanilla is probably closer to 0.5%.

As for the ranking, I had my housemates blind taste-test each of these cookies and asked them to score them on a scale of 1 to 7, from really bad to really good, on the categories of taste, texture, and overall, along with their comments. Learning a bit from my past experiences of trying to score food objectively, I spent more time defining what each score meant, which is what is detailed down below:

1 – I strongly dislike this. I’m spitting this cookie out.

2 – I somewhat dislike this. I would refuse a second cookie.

3 – I dislike this but it’s not terrible, I’d eat a second to be polite if I was forced to.

4 – I’m neutral, it’s okay but it’s not particularly wow-ing.

5 – I somewhat like this, if I ate this cookie at a team meeting, I’d feel happier.

6- I like this, I’d like a second cookie of this.

7- I really like this, it’s giving me the equivalent of a Ratatouille food critic flashback experience

Rankings

After testing the cookies, the overall score ranking was as follows:

1. Nestle Tollhouse
2. CH Cookie
3. AllRecipes
4. Bravetart
5. Food Lab (by default)

So there are some things to consider here:

• I ended having to eliminate the Food Lab cookie from the cookie taste test since I made this cookie a few days earlier and by the time I made the other four cookies, it went stale. Which probably also says a bit about the cookie too. So this taste test only includes 4 cookies for this reason.
• I also ended up baking each of the cookies, based on color, so there were some differences in baking time, which may or may be detrimental to the cookie. In hindsight, I should have followed the recipe to the T.
• Audience matters. I had four housemates act as my testers here and all of them had their preferences. For example, one of them hates chocolate. Another really likes chocolate. Another doesn’t care what she eats as long as it’s soft.
• Texture ended up mattering the most, being the deciding factor. If the reviewer liked the texture, it would do well. If the reviewer didn’t like the texture, the overall score would be poor. In most cases, except for one, the texture score determined the overall score.

Here are some data to throw at ya now:

In-Depth Look at Each Cookie

AllRecipes

A cool fun fact about this cookie was that this was created by someone from my church. Something that my church values is being a host to others and loving people through food. Which is very true. It is my guess that this cookie is solid because it was made and reformed through iterations of feeding these cookies to many different people.

Something unique about this cookie was the requirement to dissolve the baking soda in hot water. A google search tells me that this step helps the baking soda be better dispersed in the batter. I don’t know how necessary this step is.

Comments included that this cookie tasted on the sweeter end with a soft and chewy texture. Overall a solid cookie and satisfied the general palette.

Nestle Tollhouse

I followed the recipe written on the back of a bag of Nestle Tollhouse semisweet chocolate chips. A classic cookie, this ended up being the most addicting cookie to eat. A brother at my church brought a plate of this cookies to a team meeting. I ended up eating 4-5 in one sitting and asked him for the recipe. Sheepishly, he mentioned that it was the Nestle Tollhouse recipe.

The one thing that stood out about this cookie was its texture, which was chewy on the inside and crisp on the outside, achieving the perfect texture combination. This was a favorite amongst the testers for that reason.

CH Cookie

Stepping more into fussy cookie making territory, this recipe had some interesting steps from partially melting butter to adding molasses to this cookie, leading to its dark brown color. Comments were noted about its butterscotch-like flavor and a good balance of sweetness. It was voted to have one of the better flavor profiles. I did overbake by a bit so the cookie came out a bit harder than I expected as it cooled down.

This was voted to be a solid cookie, owing mostly to its flavor profile and would probably be a knockout cookie if baked for a bit less to nail the texture down.

Food Lab

Because this cookie was made a day before, I couldn’t submit this cookie to be part of the testing in good faith. For my personal experience with making this cookie, I was personally a little disappointed. The recipe required a chill period for the dough and browning the butter. I expected the flavor to be amazing but the cookie ended up tasting like a normal cookie, maybe with something a bit off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was missing but I also felt that the flavor was lacking a certain note, maybe too little vanilla? The saltiness surprised me and struck me as a bit iffy but a roommate said that she preferred the saltiness. Maybe this cookie isn’t my cup of tea.

I had higher hopes for this cookie but the flavor profile of this cookie didn’t match to my expectations.

Bravetart

I have made this cookie before and wanted to give it a second chance. It had failed that second chance. With the amount of effort I put in into making this cookie, though the cookie tasted fine, it wasn’t something that matched up to my expectations. This was the one cookie that asked for nutmeg and different types of chocolate (so I mixed white chocolate with semi-sweet chocolate). I did overbake the first batch, which led to its crunch exterior. Predictably, this was unpopular with the voters.

With the second batch baked properly, the cookie tasted much softer but did not achieve the same desirable texture, previously seen with AllRecipes or the Nestle Tollhouse recipe. I don’t think I’ll make this again.

Overall

My main takeaway from this, with the winner being Nestle Tollhouse, is to not fix things that aren’t broken. No need for even browning butter. Sometimes, simple is better. No need to reinvent the wheel again.

At the end of the day, people do enjoy all types of cookies, including the simple ones.

Doesn’t need to be fancy to have a good cookie.

I’m gonna take a break from cookies.