I Baked 400 Cookies to Find the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

For the past couple years, this Time.com article about the science behind baking the most delicious chocolate chip cookie ever has been popping up in my newsfeed. In it, they offer various hacks to alter the classic Nestlé Toll House recipe (the one of the back of the package) to your specific tastes. You know, add more of this to make a chewier cookie or a little bit of that to make it crispy. We all have our preferences, but what I wanted to know was, what kind of cookie is the absolute best?

In order to figure that out, I decided to try out nine of the hacks suggested by the article and have my colleagues take a blind taste test and vote for the best cookie. I got about 40 some-odd cookies out of each recipe—so yes, I baked almost 400 cookies in my tiny kitchen. But it was worth it!

Curious to see if people prefer crispy to chewy or cakey to something that tastes like a store-bought cookie? Read on for the results.