We Tested Celebrity Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes To Find The Best One

Are Chocolate Chip Cookies the perfect homemade baked good? They just might be. Easy to make and even easier to enjoy, there are about a million and one ways to make them. Some people like them cakey, some people like them buttery and crisp, some like them ooey-gooey, some with an extra sprinkling of salt… but one thing remains true no matter the personal cookie preference — we all just love Chocolate Chip Cookies.

In fact, there are countless Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes out there, but we wanted to find the very best one. We took four popular Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes — each with their own distinct flair — and put them to the test. Read on to see if we found the ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie!

The Contenders:

We chose cookie recipes from four different celebrity chefs. Here’s why we chose each one:

Martha Stewart:
Martha has an endless catalog of reliable classics but baking just might be her strong suit. A simple recipe built on butter, brown and white sugar, and a hefty portion of chocolate, this seemed like a classic cookie through and through and, thus, a great contender.

Joanna Gaines:
Joanna is more known for her interior design but has some successful cookbooks to her name so we wanted to see how her cookies would compare. Her recipe has no white sugar at all so we wondered how that would affect texture and flavor.

Ree Drummond:
The Pioneer Woman is a go-to name when it comes to comfort food and cookies are the ultimate comfort. With flax seed, instant coffee, and two kinds of chocolate in her cookies, we were curious to see if this cookie was too unique for our tastes.

Ina Garten:
When the Barefoot Contessa does something, she does it right, so there’s no question that she’d make an excellent Chocolate Chip Cookie. The question is, how would it stack up to the rest?

The Methods:

In a single day, we made A LOT of cookies. (It was the best day of work ever.)

We had two chefs make two cookies each and then we taste tested all the doughs as well as all the finished cookies. Here’s how each method differed:

Martha Stewart:

There’s nothing really out of the ordinary about Martha’s cookie. It’s made from classic ingredients — butter, flour, brown and white sugar, chocolate chips — and mixed together with a classic creaming method. The differences are in the ratios of those ingredients. She uses a lot of butter (two and a half sticks), much more brown sugar than white, and more chocolate chips than I’ve ever seen in a cookie at a whopping four and a half cups. (That’s about two bags!)

While she says you can chill the dough, you don’t have to, so while an overnight stay in the fridge might deepen flavor a bit, these are perfectly fine to just scoop and bake. She calls for a 2 1/4 inch scoop, so these make big cookies, and they bake for at least fifteen minutes until they’re beautifully golden. This gives them a crisp edge and deepens their flavor.

You can find Martha’s recipe here: Martha Stewart’s Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Joanna Gaines:

Joanna’s recipe had the least amount of ingredients of all the recipes. Just the basics like flour, baking soda, salt, butter, egg, vanilla, and semisweet chocolate chips. The most unique aspect of her recipe was that she relies entirely on brown sugar for sweetness with no white sugar included at all. That simplifies matters, for sure!

She doesn’t require any special methods and uses a basic creaming method where you then whisk together the dry ingredients before mixing them in. The chocolate chips get mixed in with the mixer as well so they get broken up just a tad. And then there’s no chilling or freezing or any other steps — just scoop and bake, so you get to eating cookies pretty darn quickly. They’re done in just ten minutes, which is great news.

You can find Joanna’s recipe here: Joanna Gaines’ Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Ree Drummond:

The Pioneer Woman’s dough was the most unique. She was the only one to incorporate margarine — which generally gives you a cakier, flatter cookie — but she combined it with butter for flavor along with some crushed flax seed, instant coffee, and both milk and semisweet chocolate chips. She has you stir the dough together by hand, no mixer needed (even though it’s a little hard to do) and then scoop and bake. No chilling or freezing required.

The dough itself was very soft and very flavorful! You could taste the coffee and the two kinds of chocolate was really nice. If you’re in the cookie game to eat the dough, this is a good recipe to go with.

You can find Ree’s’s recipe here: The Pioneer Woman’s Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Ina Garten:

Ina’s dough is interesting. She calls for a half a pound of butter (that’s two sticks!), only a touch of brown sugar, an extra large egg, chopped bittersweet chocolate, and also some fleur de sel to finish things off. (All the other normal cookie accoutrements too like flour and baking soda; I’m just pointing out the unique choices.) She uses a creaming method that’s pretty standard.

And then she asks you to scoop out that dough in very large scoops — 1/3 cup in size — before placing them on a parchment lined baking sheet. At first, she has you line up as many scoops as you want on the baking sheet and then you’re instructed to freeze the scooped dough for exactly fifteen minutes. No more, no less, and that fact is mentioned a couple of times. You then take only four scoops of the semi-frozen dough and pop them on a baking sheet far apart from each other to bake. These are big cookies, after all!

Then comes for a unique technique:

You bake the cookies for ten minutes, then you take the pan from the oven and bang it on the stovetop or counter until the cookies deflate a bit. You return them to the oven for three minutes, then remove and bang them again, then return them to the oven, and repeat until they’ve baked for a total of eighteen minutes. Then, finally, a finish of fleur de sel.

You can find Ina’s’s recipe here: Ina Garten’s Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies.