The Best Chocolate Chips: A Blind Taste Test

In our Taste Test series, BA editors conduct blind comparisons to discover the best supermarket staples (like vanilla ice cream or frozen pizza). Today, which chocolate chips are the most cookie-worthy?

As far as baking essentials go, chocolate chips rank pretty damn high. Besides the eponymous, iconic, and boundary-breaking chocolate chip cookie, they’re also a pivotal add-in for muffins and banana breads—or the perfect snack when you’re craving a bit of chocolate, and somehow find your house otherwise treat-less.

Chocolate chips were first born nearly a century ago. They were invented after Ruth Graves Wakefield, a chef at Toll House in Whitman, Massachusetts, created the first chocolate chip cookies in the 1930s. The cookies were massively popular, but made by supposedly breaking a chocolate bar into chunks. Nestlé approached Wakefield about licensing her recipe (which she reportedly sold for a dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate), and slapped it on the back of their new product: chocolate chips. Now, most people use bagged chocolate chips—morsels, technically—over broken up chocolate bars when they bake chocolate chip cookies.

Today, there are a lot of different chocolates living in the baking aisle of your grocery store. Between dark, milk, white, semisweet, and whatever “super cookie chocolate chip chunks” are, there’s a whole mess of choices. Many chocolate chip cookie recipes call for semisweet chocolate chips, which technically fall under the umbrella of dark chocolate. You may also be familiar with its cousin, bittersweet chocolate, another type of dark chocolate. Both must be made with at least 35% chocolate liquor (liquified cacao nibs that, combined with cocoa butter and solids, make up pure chocolate), though semisweet typically has more sugar.

To find the top-of-the-line, absolute best chocolate chips, we went all out. We put nine brands of semi-sweet chocolate chips through a blind taste test, first trying samples of the chips on their own, then trying them in BA’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies (which really are spectacular, in case you’ve forgotten). We were looking for a chip with profound cocoa flavor, and a good balance of sweet and bitter. We also wanted chips that were creamy and melty, not chalky or waxy. We also wanted a chip that would make the cookies sing.

After some serious debate, and more than one genuine upset, we found our winner.

Un-Chocolaty: Nestlé Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels

What’s inside: There’s a great debate about chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies. Some argue that chopped up chocolate bars are superior, since they melt into gooey pools, whereas chips hold their form (senior service editor Kelsey Youngman boldly called chocolate chips the “pre-shredded cheese” of the chocolate world). That’s because chocolate chips contain a stabilizer (in Toll House’s case, soy lecithin) to keep the chips intact at higher temperatures.