The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
J. Kenji López-Alt · Serious Eats · 2013 · Original Recipe
Against 612 chocolate chip cookie recipes
5/5 chewy and 5/5 crisp, with more fat than 86% of recipes and more sugar than 85%.
Exhaustively tested with scientific approach. Brown butter for nutty toffee flavor, bread flour for chew, hand-chopped chocolate for irregular pockets, extra egg yolk for richness. The Food Lab methodology applied to cookies.
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 · +4.2 pts- +1.0bread flour
- +1.0brown sugar (50% of sugar)
- +1.0browned butter
- +0.7extra yolk
- +0.3fat-rich dough (flour:fat 1.11)
- +0.2baking soda
Crispiness
5/5 · +2.8 pts- +1.0white sugar (50% of sugar)
- +0.8fat-rich dough (flour:fat 1.11)
- +0.7long or low bake (325°F, 13 min)
- -0.5bread flour
- +0.4browned butter
- +0.3baking soda
- +0.1low hydration (0.27)
Cakeyness
1/5 · -0.7 pts- -0.8browned butter
- +0.1white sugar (50% of sugar)
Thickness
2/5 · +0.9 pts- +1.012 h chill
- -0.5browned butter
- +0.4bread flour
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
- 325°F (163°C)
- Bake Time
- 11-15 min
- Chill
- 12 hr
- Yield
- ~24 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: 2.2, 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
1.11
Flour:Sugar
0.89
Brown:White Sugar
1.00
Egg:Flour
0.27
Chocolate:Flour
0.91
Fat %
21.2
Sugar %
26.3
Flour %
23.4
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 5/5 crisp. The ratio charts show which ingredient changes move those.
- Where it sits among the restEvery recipe plotted by ingredient makeup, The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies included.
- Compare the ingredientsHow this recipe's amounts compare with the other 611.
Or browse all 612 cookie recipes.