Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies
Cook's Illustrated · Cook's Illustrated · 2014 · Original Recipe
Against 612 chocolate chip cookie recipes
5/5 chewy and 4/5 crisp, with more sugar than 80% of recipes and more brown sugar against white than 78%.
Cook's Illustrated exhaustive testing to create the 'perfect' cookie with brown butter, controlled spread, and complex flavor. Uses a unique technique of dissolving sugar in brown butter before adding dry ingredients for toffee-like depth.
Chewiness
Crispiness
Cakeyness
Thickness
Spread
Richness
Sweetness
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 · +3.1 pts- +1.2brown sugar (60% of sugar)
- +1.0browned butter
- +0.7extra yolk
- +0.2baking soda
Crispiness
4/5 · +2.4 pts- +0.8fat-rich dough (flour:fat 1.25)
- +0.8white sugar (40% of sugar)
- +0.4browned butter
- +0.3baking soda
- +0.1low hydration (0.27)
Cakeyness
1/5 · -0.7 pts- -0.8browned butter
- +0.1white sugar (40% of sugar)
Thickness
5/5 · +0.6 pts- +0.763 g per cookie
- -0.5browned butter
- +0.4375°F oven
Scores are computed from the recipe using a published-science rubric. See how it works.
Ingredients
Process
- Mixing
- brown butter
- Butter
- browned
- Eggs
- mixed
- Bake Temp
- 375°F (191°C)
- Bake Time
- 10-14 min
- Chill
- None
- Yield
- ~16 cookies
- Sheet Prep
- parchment
Recipe Radar
How this recipe's ratios compare to the dataset. Amber = this recipe, dashed gray = dataset median.
Outlier Profile
Uniqueness score: 1.6, 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.
Key Ratios
Flour:Fat
1.25
Flour:Sugar
1.00
Brown:White Sugar
1.49
Egg:Flour
0.27
Chocolate:Flour
0.92
Fat %
19.7
Sugar %
24.7
Flour %
24.6
Hydration
0.27
Keep exploring
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Nearest neighbours by the numbers, not by name.
Do something with it
- Find the cookie you actually wantAnswer a few questions about texture and the tree points at the recipes that match.
- See what moves the textureThis one is 5/5 chewy and 4/5 crisp. The ratio charts show which ingredient changes move those.
- Where it sits among the restEvery recipe plotted by ingredient makeup, Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies included.
- Compare the ingredientsHow this recipe's amounts compare with the other 611.
Or browse all 612 cookie recipes.