Chocolate Chip Cookie Lab612 recipes
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Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

America's Test Kitchen · America's Test Kitchen / Cook's Illustrated · 2009 · Original Recipe

Against 612 chocolate chip cookie recipes

5/5 chewy and 3/5 crisp, with more brown sugar against white than 83% of recipes and more sugar than 82%.

See how all 612 cookie recipes compare →

ATK's meticulously tested recipe. Brown butter is the key innovation for nutty depth. Extra egg yolk for richness. Bread flour for chew. Controlled technique yields consistently thick, chewy results. One of their highest rated recipes.

Author sayschewytitlethicktitle
5

Chewiness

3

Crispiness

1

Cakeyness

5

Thickness

5

Spread

3

Richness

5

Sweetness

4

Flavor add-ins

Scores are 1 to 5 across all 612 recipes. Chewiness, crispiness, cakeyness and thickness are computed from the recipe using a published-science rubric; spread, richness, sweetness and flavor add-ins are percentile ranks of the ingredient numbers. See how it works.

Why it scores this way

Every rubric factor that applies to this recipe, with the points it adds or removes. Hover a factor for the mechanism behind it. The displayed thickness score comes from a fitted model that agrees slightly better with authors' words; these are the rubric's reasons.

Chewiness

5/5 · +4.2 pts
  • +1.3brown sugar (66% of sugar)
  • +1.0bread flour
  • +1.0browned butter
  • +0.7extra yolk
  • +0.2baking soda

Crispiness

3/5 · +1.7 pts
  • +0.8fat-rich dough (flour:fat 1.26)
  • +0.7white sugar (34% of sugar)
  • -0.5bread flour
  • +0.4browned butter
  • +0.3baking soda
  • +0.1low hydration (0.27)

Cakeyness

1/5 · -1.2 pts
  • -0.8browned butter
  • -0.5mostly brown sugar (66%)
  • +0.1white sugar (34% of sugar)

Thickness

5/5 · +1.3 pts
  • +1.074 g per cookie
  • -0.5browned butter
  • +0.4375°F oven
  • +0.4bread flour

Scores are computed from the recipe using a published-science rubric. See how it works.

chewythickbrown butterbread flourextra yolk

Ingredients

bread flour250g
butter198g
granulated sugar100g
packed dark brown sugar198g
egg50g
egg yolk18g
vanilla extract8g
baking soda5g
salt5g
semi-sweet chocolate chips255g
chopped pecans90g
Total dough weight1.2kg

Process

Mixing
brown butter
Butter
browned
Eggs
mixed
Bake Temp
375°F (191°C)
Bake Time
10-14 min
Chill
None
Yield
~16 cookies

Recipe Radar

How this recipe's ratios compare to the dataset. Amber = this recipe, dashed gray = dataset median.

Outlier Profile

Uniqueness score: 1.8, a single number for how far this recipe sits from the typical recipe across all ratios. Each bar is a z-score: how many standard deviations that ratio sits above or below the dataset mean.

Percentile Rankings

Where this recipe falls compared to all 612 recipes in the dataset.

Flour:Fat1.26 (32th percentile)
Flour:Sugar0.84 (15th percentile)
Brown:White Sugar1.98 (84th percentile)
Egg:Flour0.27 (57th percentile)
Chocolate:Flour1.02 (64th percentile)
Fat %16.8 (54th percentile)
Sugar %25.3 (83th percentile)
Hydration0.27 (50th percentile)
Bake Temp375 (86th percentile)

Key Ratios

Flour:Fat

1.26

Flour:Sugar

0.84

Brown:White Sugar

1.98

Egg:Flour

0.27

Chocolate:Flour

1.02

Fat %

16.8

Sugar %

25.3

Flour %

21.3

Hydration

0.27

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