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Pro Chefs Blind Taste Test Every Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough & Mix

Chefs Camari Mick, Laurie Ellen Pellicano, and Umber Ahmad are used to thinking outside the box when it comes to cooking; however, today on Epicurious we’ve asked them to give us their unfiltered, honest reviews of some prominent chocolate chip cookie doughs and mixes found on supermarket shelves. Which cookies pack the most bang for your budget, and which should you avoid at all costs?

Released on 02/12/2025

Transcript

[Host] We've gathered three professional chefs

to blind taste test every chocolate chip cookie dough

and mix we could get our hands on

to see which ones meet their standards.

Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Lovers Cookie Dough.

Right off the bat, I could tell that these are

the square bakes.

Definitely a break and bake cookie.

You've got that nice sort of tan,

been in the sun a little bit, kind of a color, which I love.

My idea of a perfect chocolate chip cookie

is a crisp exterior with a very chewy, warm, gooey interior.

It shatters a little bit when you bite into it

and then your teeth just kind of sink after that.

[Camari] I would love to have real chocolate.

You want the chocolate to be able to stand on its own.

[Camari] Perfect chocolate chip cookie

should be at least 40% chocolate.

The right amount of sweet,

but also the right amount of salty.

You wanna have balance.

So this cookie has a bit of a crisp exterior, which is nice.

The inside's a little drier than I would like.

The ratio of flour to butter seems

a little bit too high for me,

so it's coming off a little dry

and I could kinda taste the flour.

This cookie also to me, tastes like it has a lot

of white sugar in it and not as much brown sugar.

If you have less brown sugar and less molasses,

you, by definition are gonna have less moisture.

I'm not so sure I love the chocolate.

I don't really wanna eat a ton of it on its own.

When you get a morsel, it's like extra sweet.

Mass-produced chocolate chips

tend to have more emulsifiers and additives.

If you can take a chocolate chip out of a cookie

and crumble it like this, it tends to not necessarily be

the highest quality chocolate.

I'm pretty sure it's a Toll House cookie.

Okay. Nestle Toll House.

I was right. [chuckles]

This for a long time was considered the gold standard

of chocolate chip cookie in America.

This one says it has chunks.

They are liars! There's not one chunk in here.

False advertising, I'm emailing.

[Host] King Arthur Baking Company

Outrageous Chocolate Chip Mix.

It's a little blonde,

so I think it's got some bleached white flour in there.

Ooh, kind of dry.

It kinda has like a pliable, crispy outside.

Lots of chocolate chips in here.

This one actually does have a chunk in it.

No, immediately, no.

Very dry.

Different types of flour have different levels of protein

and protein is what makes things chewy or make things tough.

So a higher protein flour is gonna give you something

that probably tastes a little bit more like this,

which is a little bit tougher.

It doesn't have a ton of color

and the fact that it's kind of hard,

indicates that they used white sugar.

There's like a white note to it.

White sugar, white flour,

it doesn't have a lot of complexity.

The chocolate is really sweet.

Chocolate that has more sugar

tends to have less cocoa in it.

This feels like more sweet, lower percentage chocolate.

Oh, King Arthur. Oh!

Yikes, I talked some [beep].

They also bake their cookies at a much higher temperature

than we would normally do

and I wonder if that's also kind of lend to the drying out

and becoming crispy faster.

I am a huge fan of King Arthur.

Love King Arthur Flour.

Phenomenal flour, but not in chocolate chip cookies.

[Host] Trader Joe's

Super Chocolatey Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough.

First impressions of this cookie,

it's starting to look a little bit more

like what I want in a cookie.

Listen to that.

Chocolate chips on the bottom,

we see chocolate chunks on the top.

Lot more chew inside, which I love.

The brown sugar makes it like a chewier

that's gonna stay sort of like caramel.

[Umber] It also has a little hint of salt, which I like.

The flavors are sticking around

a little bit longer in my mouth.

The chocolate quality in this is definitely better

than the Toll House.

The chocolate's a little bit darker,

even though it's a like room temperature cookie,

it is still able to melt.

Trader Joe's.

Trader Joe's.

Look at you, Trader Joe's.

It's unbleached enriched flour, so if it's unbleached,

there's a natural aging process where air ages, bleaches

and gets the wheat to where it needs to be flour.

Bleached flour has an accelerated process

because additives are used to get a lighter color

and a little bit of a lighter texture.

Baking powder, baking soda,

which is also a good thing to have baking powder

and baking soda, baking powder poofs, baking soda spreads.

Overall, not bad I would say so far,

this one might be leading the pack.

[Host] Pillsbury Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.

Super round, suspiciously round.

This one's really flat.

It's almost like a Florentine,

it's like, so you can kind of like see through it.

[Camari] The chips almost like poke out of it

because it spreads so much.

Probably has too much wet ingredients in it

so it's not holding together as well.

It looks like it wants to crisp, but it's still soft.

Balance is off in this one.

Wrong amount of chocolate.

A little too wet, not crispy enough,

a bit more flour added to it

would kinda help it hold together.

It's quite sweet,

which also makes sense when you get a cookie this thin,

it probably has a little more white sugar in it.

This is okay.

This cookie has a very nostalgic taste for me,

which makes me think that it might be white fat guy.

What is that? Pillsbury? Pillsbury.

Oh! The log.

Look at this.

Safe to eat raw.

Wow! They really marketing to people.

Maybe that's why the cookie looks like that

because there might not be eggs in here.

Palm oil.

Palm oil alarms me.

It's definitely more affordable than butter

and if you're producing as much cookie dough

as the Doughboy's producing,

I would imagine that that's a huge consideration.

There's also very little egg in here.

The eggs act as a binder in the cookie dough.

So seeing that this cookie is super flat, I understand why.

[Host] Dorothy Parton's Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

There actually is a lot of chocolate chips.

You see these brown edging on the side,

this is telling me that it's either all white sugar,

tons of butter, which look at my hands, I'm right.

It's tons of butter.

Definitely crisp on the edges.

Nice chew in the middle too.

Has a little bit more of the brown sugar,

which I actually like.

For me, the cookie's too soft,

so if there's more brown sugar, there's more molasses.

I think it tipped the scales a little bit too much.

There's definitely some salt in here.

It's not giving that overly manufactured cookie taste,

which is rather surprising.

Some of the ingredients feel

like they're of better quality.

The chocolate's not bad.

I'm impressed this is a store-bought cookie.

I would guess that it's a Duncan Heinz kind of a box mix.

Oh! It is a box mix.

Ah, Dolly Parton's.

It's giving me a little like easy bake oven almost,

you know, in a positive way.

Brown sugar.

Yeah, and that's interesting.

It's the second ingredient listed.

[Host] Betty Crocker Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

Whoa! Hi, sad little guy.

This one's really thin, lot of spread.

Every bite deserves a chocolate chip.

It's all just scrunched together.

It feels a little bit dry,

just when something snaps like that.

It kinda just bends, very sad.

It's weak, this cookie is weak.

Sometimes when you put a lot of vanilla into a cookie,

it starts to taste a little bit more like cake,

this taste like cake.

It is really quite sweet, pretty bland.

Having a mix of flours,

I like to use a mix of AP flour and bread flour,

helps give it a little bit more structure

so you don't have that flat landing cookie.

The finer and the thinner at room temperature a fat is,

the finer and thinner your cookie's gonna be.

That really affects your cookie a lot.

It kind of tastes like I'm eating a packet of white sugar

that's been bound together with some egg.

Doesn't have a lot of depth of taste,

which to me says it's probably a lot of white sugar.

She's not chewy.

She's not crispy.

She doesn't have any color.

She's Betty Crocker.

Oh, what is it? Ah! She's Betty Crocker.

Yeah, yeah.

I definitely like this one the least so far.

[Host] Jacques Torres Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

Oh, she's a big girl.

Whoa! This is what I'm talking about.

Look at this!

This is the size you want your chocolate chip cookie.

And it's got this good kind of rippling on the surface.

It usually means there's a good chewy texture

on the inside.

What's interesting is

if you can see the back of the cookie,

you can see it's like massive pools of chocolate.

Typically with chocolate chips,

there are emulsifiers and stabilizers in the chocolate chip

that it's gonna keep the shape of the chocolate chip

even when it's baked at a high temperature.

When you see something like this

as sort of like ooey-gooey situation,

it typically means that it's not a standard chocolate chip.

[Camari] F-E-V-E-S, Feves-

And those are like almost like disks.

That's what you want in a chocolate chip cookie.

It's very good.

That is 80% chocolate.

There's so much chocolate inside that it is chewy

because you're biting into soft chocolate.

So I almost can't tell what the dough is like.

I actually don't want any dough.

It's actually really good chocolate.

That shininess in your chocolate says

that it's got the cocoa butter in it.

It definitely is such a thing as too much chocolate.

If I wanted a chocolate bar, I would buy a chocolate bar.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

It's Jacques Torres.

The number one ingredient in the mix is chocolate.

Look at those chocolate chunks, yes.

[Host] Capello's Gluten-and-Dairy-Free

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.

What a contrast.

We went from like, oh to like, oh.

This one's very small.

This looks gluten-free.

And then I would put money on it too that it might be vegan.

It smells like it's got maple syrup

or an alternative sweetener.

A lot of vegan recipes don't use white sugar.

The way it's manufactured, it gets ground down with bone.

Ooh, it's super like soft, oh, man down.

I say this is the nicest way possible, this tastes healthy.

Kinda tastes like a granola bar.

Maybe there's some oat flour or almond mill.

It's heavy on the salt, which I appreciate.

It's not as sweet, it's pretty dry.

[Camari] The chocolate chips are quite lovely.

It's some of the better chocolate, it's a little bitter,

probably to help kind of mask a little bit

of what the other ingredients are that are in there.

It's not my favorite.

Oh. Capella's Grain-free,

vegan, paleo, gluten-free.

Good luck. That's a lot of free.

There's some almond flour and maple syrup,

which I got immediately on the nose.

It says that they split the almond using the protein,

fiber and healthy fats and almonds

to create cookie dough unlike any other.

They're not wrong.

Into it, yeah.

Would I buy it? No, I'm not Gluten-free.

[Host] Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

This is a cute cookie, but is it chocolate chip?

How do we know it's chocolate chip?

[Umber] All of the chocolate chips are hidden,

which means the dough is probably pretty thick.

The outside is pretty like crisp.

Inside is definitely soft.

[Umber] This is super chewy cookie.

Come on, this is really sad.

If I got this, I would write a strong email.

[Laurie] This is probably the least chocolatey.

[chuckles] Yo.

Hmm, that's a good cookie.

Oh my God, the texture is really delightful.

I love the flavor,

you can definitely taste the vanilla in it.

This has a lot of vanilla in.

It tastes like birthday cake.

The cookie itself is doing its job,

but there is not enough chocolate in this cookie.

Is this Ghirardelli?

Because of the chips, they're big chips.

That's Ghirardelli's thing.

[Chefs] Ah!

Ghirardelli! Oh, and it's a dark chocolate chip.

I expect more from you.

There's not a lot of chocolate in here.

The chocolate is a pretty good chocolate.

They make a lot of different types of chocolate

and in here,

it seems like there's only semi-sweet chocolate chips,

which is kind of disappointing.

Bro, there's no chocolate chips in here.

[Host] Bob's Red Mill

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

Okay, we have another tiny cookie.

[Laurie] It's a little crispier on the edges.

Crispy on the outside, maybe gonna be a little dry.

This cookie is very sweet

and it tastes like it has almond in it.

So I'm gonna say that this one might be gluten-free too.

There's a residue or a powdery something

that's coming off my fingers.

[Camari] Not super chewy.

Not the kind of crunch you want

because it's a crunch that sort of feels like dry.

Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob Mills.

Yeah, oh yeah, I said it, Bob Red Mills.

It's Bob's Red Mill and it is gluten-free.

Oh, it's rice flour, that's what that is.

They do such a good job of masking that.

And the chocolate chips are probably like decent quality

because they don't have a ton of extra ingredients at them.

Okay for a gluten-free.

[Host] Whole Foods 365 Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

Definitely looks like it has a lot of white sugar in it.

Has kind of like that sheen.

[Laurie] We're in the not so many chips portion

of the tasting experience.

Oh, I love that chocolate hole, that's always cute.

This is super chewy.

Almost kinda like a raw taste to it.

I'm trying to like figure out what that flavor is.

It's a little chemically.

It has like a saltiness on the back end

that's not delicious.

There's a very there unnatural flavor in there.

I don't taste any vanilla in here and I miss it.

She's a basic quality chocolate.

And then there's not enough chocolate,

so the texture's completely off, yeah.

It's not chewy, it's not crunchy.

It's kind of just like there.

And I don't want to eat anymore.

This would be a cookie I wouldn't remember

and that makes me sad.

[chuckles] It is Whole Foods 365.

Whole Foods brand.

Not loving this one.

One of the ingredients in here is a natural flavor.

It's usually produced in the lab.

The fact that they are saying to add water is blasphemy.

If you need a liquid in your cookie dough,

why wouldn't you add milk, cream?

Why wouldn't you add something

like a little bit more flavorful other than water?

No.

[Host] Sweet Lauren's Gluten-and-Dairy-Free

Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough.

This looks like a play cookie.

Like a little cookie for your little doll.

And it is a little gray.

I'm not loving the color.

It just looks so anemic.

It also has sandier texture

than some of the other ones I've had.

The flavor's not as bad as the color.

[Umber] There's a tiny shell of a crisp outside

and a totally different texture inside.

It's pretty soft, but not in the like most pleasant way.

[Umber] I like this chocolate.

Gives it a nice balance of bittersweetness.

This definitely seems like a chopped chocolate

that gets tossed in, which is what I really look for

and appreciate in a cookie.

I say, Sweet Loren's? Maybe, Sweet Loren's.

Sweet Loren's, look at that.

She's using a flour blend that has oat tapioca and potato.

Oat was maybe the thing that has a little bit

of that texture to it.

[Host] Great Value Ready to Bake Cookie Dough.

This is the cutest little cookie.

It smells really chocolatey.

It also kind of smells like butter,

but that might be more like butter flavor,

like at a movie theater.

This is Chips Ahoy?

That butter flavor hangs around a little bit.

Definitely something in there that's not the most pleasant.

This is too crunchy for mine, for my taste.

[Laurie] This is a little crisp and a little chew.

There's some good browning.

It definitely has a nice sort of sugary,

caramelized taste to it.

I would imagine there's brown sugar

and/or molasses in this cookie, which I like.

It has a lot of chocolate, I like the ratio.

The chocolate tastes pretty good.

It's a little sweet.

It's hitting my teeth in a way that's a little painful.

Am I right?

Great Value, Walmart.

It's not a bad cookie.

It's really soft.

I'm noticing that in here, which means

that it has like a lot of additional ingredients,

keeping it nice and tender straight from the refrigerator

'cause it's also cold.

I will say, there's a lot more ingredients in this

than a lot of the others, so that's not great.

Ascorbic acid added as a dough conditioner?

It's for more mass-produced things

that are passing through machines.

That's an ingredient that's keeping it kind of tender.

Can definitely impart an unpleasant flavor.

[Host] Krusteaz Triple Chocolate Chunk.

So this little guy

has not that many chocolate chips in it.

It's kind of got this netting on the top from the sugar,

maybe a little too much.

I wouldn't say that there's a crispiness

to the outside at all.

Texture's not great.

It's soft.

I think it might have like cake flour

or another kind of soft white flour.

There's not the same kind of density

or chewiness that you want from a chocolate chip cookie.

Barely even tastes the chocolate,

which doesn't seem to be like the best quality.

This one tastes a little unbalanced to me.

Kind of hits you with sugar

and everything else sort of follows after.

Lots of vanilla.

It's more vanilla than it is chocolate.

No personality.

Oh, Krusteaz. I've heard of these.

It wasn't crusty.

They're more well known for their biscuits?

Three kinds of chocolate, it says, triple.

I'm not gonna say that that was something that I noticed.

[Host] Stonewall Kitchen

Classic Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

[Camari] Okay, last cookie.

This cookie smells really good.

[Camari] You can see the sugar crystal still.

[Laurie] And it is pretty dry.

So definitely a little bit of resistance

when I broke it open.

So there's like a hint of that crunchy,

crispiness on the outside.

It tastes very generic.

Not a lot of complexity.

It's a really, really dry cookie.

You can see there's a lot of air pockets inside

and air is the enemy of pastry.

[Crew] Since it's so dry, do you want a glass of milk?

Ooh, maybe.

This kind of cookie might be like a good dipping cookie.

This is perfect for dipping.

The milk helps a little.

It makes it better.

In the milk, perfect.

Outside of the milk, needs milk.

The chocolate itself is pretty good,

but it doesn't matter how good the chocolate is

if what's enrobing it is just dry

and a little bit lacking in personality.

Stonewall Kitchen.

I think they do jams,

kind of nicer jams and things.

So this one's trying to be kind of a nicer cookie,

but I'm not as convinced, I'm sorry.

They have the least amount of ingredients.

Mixes have less preservatives than the pre-made doughs

because I mean, once you add liquid to any dry ingredient,

everything's gonna start to break down.

I would highly recommend make them the day before,

the night before and let them age

so you have that chance for everything to be hydrated.

[Host] Now let's see which cookies

are chefs like the most and the least.

My favorite cookie today was Jacques Torres.

[Laurie] It's the closest to the ideal cookie

that I had today.

[Camari] It is nice and big with a crispy exterior

and a nice soft middle.

[Laurie] It has the best quality chocolate in it.

My favorite cookie today was the Pillsbury log of dough.

Just stood the test of time and I think memories

and food are so inextricably linked.

My least favorite cookie today was the Whole Foods 365.

It had an unpleasant smell and a lingering taste

that I did not enjoy.

I would rather have the paleo-vegan cookie.

That little hockey puck from the woods,

whatever that was, Capello's.

[Laurie] I mean, King Arthur and Stonewall,

I'm bummed about those two.

The lesson here today, kids,

is that there are some good cookies,

there are some bad cookies, there are some tough cookies.

Finding your perfect one is maybe an endless search.