7 Steps That Made These Chocolate Chip Cookies King Arthur’s 2024 Recipe of the Year

A few simple steps and ingredient adjustments take these CCCs to the next level. 🍪

Ask a room of people what qualities make up the “best chocolate chip cookie,” and you’ll likely receive dozens of different answers (and maybe even start a light-hearted debate). The nostalgic cookie recipe is often passed down from generation to generation, but even if you don’t have a go-to family recipe, you likely have a favorite chocolate chip cookie from a bakery or supermarket.

We know everyone has different tastes: chewy vs. crispy; double-chocolate vs. oatmeal-infused; bars vs. no-bake. Some bakers swear that the secret to the best chocolate chip cookie recipe is the chocolate itself, be it chips, chunks, or shards. Recently, it’s become quite popular to sprinkle a pinch of flaky salt to balance out the sweetness and layer on some crunch.

Related: Our 21 Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes to Fit Every Preference

Our Test Kitchen’s quintessential homemade chocolate chip cookie method includes:

• An equal mix of butter and margarine to make the dough easy to work with, checking the boxes of both flavor and texture. (Butter is for flavor, and shortening keeps the cookies from spreading too much.)

• A 2-to-1 ratio of brown sugar to white sugar. Brown sugar is slightly acidic due to the molasses in the mix, and it reacts with the leavening agent, baking soda, which yields a more cake-like cookie. The white sugar offers the cookie-like consistency and ensures that the finished product isn’t too puffy or gritty.

• All-purpose flour to make the recipe accessible, as most home bakers have this on hand.

• Semisweet chocolate chips: That’s how grandma did it, and we want to follow suit!

With all of those factors in mind, we were curious to see how the baking aces at King Arthur Baking Company took their cookie recipe to a level that made it worthy of “2024 Recipe of the Year.” After all, their new and self-declared “best” chocolate chip cookie recipe skyrocketed in popularity so quickly that people literally broke their website.

King Arthur Baking Company's 2024 Recipe of the Year: Their Best Chocolate Chip Cookie

Declaring something the Recipe of the Year isn't a claim to take lightly. After two years, 75 tests, and more than 1,200 cookies, Molly Marzalek-Kelly and her crew of four other King Arthur compatriots landed on the cookie recipe worthy of sharing King Arthur’s crown—for the rest of this year, at least. (2024 marks the brand’s 11th Recipe of the Year.)

Their goal was to reinvent the classic cookie using a mix of ingredients and techniques that hit those nostalgic notes—just with the volume turned up.

“When we set out to make a chocolate chip cookie worthy of the title Recipe of the Year, we knew we had to create a version that combined ingredients and techniques in never-before-seen ways,” the King Arthur Baking team explained while introducing the recipe on their website. “This is a chocolate chip cookie in a bolder, richer, and more sophisticated territory than it's ever been before.”

Here are the 7 special steps that make this cookie recipe stand out.

Use bread flour instead of all-purpose flour.

Typically used for exactly what you might guess—bread—these cookies start with a foundation of bread flour instead of all-purpose, which is more typical in cookie recipes.

If you've ever wondered if you can substitute bread flour for all-purpose, our Test Kitchen has found that it’s best to use the flour called for in your recipe, however, you can swap bread flour for all-purpose flour (and the other way around) without needing to run to the store. Your finished product should come out fairly similar.

King Arthur Baking Company’s associate recipe editor Kye Ameden told Good Morning America that opting for bread flour creates "this soft texture that's almost a little bendy and stays that way for a few days.” The dough bakes into a cookie with “slightly crisp edges with this super soft texture with a little bit of chew."

Related: 25 of Our Test Kitchen’s Best Cookie Recipes of All Time

Brown the butter.

The supersized cookies also taste ultra-buttery. That’s not because they call for a remarkable quantity of butter, though—it’s all about the technique.

Browning your butter in a skillet gives a naturally deep, nutty, and caramel-like flavor. Along with the rest of the ingredients, the finished cookies taste more complex than if this chocolate chip cookie recipe called for softened butter, as many do.

Related: 18 Recipes That Showcase the Nutty Flavor of Brown Butter

Use all brown sugar.

A mix of brown and white sugars typically sweeten chocolate chip cookies. But here, it’s all brown—and the rationale behind that choice all boils down to more cookie science.

The King Arthur bakers explained that brown sugar delivers a “moist, bendy, chewy cookie,” since brown sugar is white sugar with molasses mixed in.

Brown sugar caramelizes at a lower temperature and tends to hold more water than already-absorbent white sugar. Invert sugars also delay the sugar’s recrystallization as the cookies cool.

Make a tangzhong.

Also helpful to dial up the softness and flexibility: tangzhong. We know it sounds technical if you’ve yet to try it, but this method isn’t as complex as it sounds.

Tangzhong is also the secret behind milk bread's soft, wispy pull-apart texture. To make a tangzhong starter for bread or cookies, heat a paste of milk and flour in a pan on a stovetop for just a few minutes. (The Recipe of the Year calls for five.) The heat causes the starch in the flour to retain more moisture, so the finished product stays fresher longer and has a loftier consistency compared to if you added those two ingredients to the cookie dough at room temperature.

“We were really excited about the idea of trying it in a cookie dough because it imparts this really wonderful soft texture that we haven't seen in a cookie before,” Ameden said to GMA.

Use chopped chocolate instead of chocolate chips.

Instead of chocolate morsels, these supersized cookies are speckled with chopped semisweet wafers. The unexpected texture offers a surprise in every bite while still delivering the sweetness and complexity you know and love from a classic chocolate chip cookie.

Related: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chill the cookies overnight.

Due to the combination of margarine and butter, our best chocolate chip cookie recipe doesn’t call for any rest time between mixing and baking. That said, we’ve frequently touted the benefits of chilling cookie dough for at least 30 minutes—and up to 5 days—before baking to amplify flavor, make the dough easier to handle, and get you more consistently-shaped cookies.

The brown butter in the mix makes it essential to chill the dough for at least a bit; otherwise, the supersized cookies would likely turn into one giant pan-sized cookie. Allowing the dough to chill overnight in the fridge also enhances the flavors since the flour has time to soak up even more of the liquid ingredients.

You only need a whisk to mix.

If you don't have an arsenal of baking tools at your disposal, you'll welcome this news: There’s zero special equipment required. You don’t need a fancy stand mixer or even a hand mixer—just a whisk, a few bowls, some measuring tools, a skillet, a saucepan, and some heat-safe utensils. And baking sheets, of course.

“If you take aside the wait time, the recipe itself is actually incredibly easy,” one home baker explained, referring to the reasonable 35 minutes of hands-on time. “And the result? Nothing short of amazing. So delicious; crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.” Another added: “I’ve been making cookies for about 60 years, and this is my favorite recipe ever.”

While we stand by our Test Kitchen’s creations, we admire the innovation of combining several creative baking techniques into one cookie recipe that still gets you that classic texture and flavor. (We're already thinking about the other cookies we could tangzhong-ify.)

If you’re in the mood to give 2024’s Recipe of the Year a try after all of this sweet talk, visit kingarthurbaking.com to get the Supersized, Super-Soft Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.

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