ChefSteps is a team of chefs, writers, and food lovers who develop recipes, techniques, and guides to help people cook better at home.

ChefSteps

Chocolate Chip Cookies: A Parametric Analysis

This Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie is a product of analyzing the 10-best chocolate chip cookie recipes on the internet, then averaging out all the ingredients. It's a great chocolate chip cookie.

The Ultimate Average Chocolate Chip Cookie

If you’ve made chocolate chip cookies before, you probably know the ingredients by heart—chocolate, of course, but also butter, sugar, flour, eggs, salt, vanilla, and some baking soda—and you know how to put them together.But have you ever stopped to think about why we add eggs to the cookie dough? Or what would happen if you added an extra yolk or cut the sugar by half? Would it be edible? Would it puff and spread and bake in the same way your usual cookie dough does?We asked ourselves all these questions and more as we set out to make the “ultimate chocolate chip cookie.” We scoured cookbooks and recipe sites to find the best recipes out there, and we made them all. We compared them against each other, mapped out their ingredients, and put them in a spreadsheet so we could identify any trends (check out our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/guides-tools/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-behold-the-cookie-calculator">chocolate chip cookie parametric analysis!</a>). And then we did something crazy: We averaged out all the ingredients in all those recipes and made a kind of average cookie—but it was so amazing, we knew it was our holy grail: the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. But to keep ourselves honest, we called it the <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/recipes/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-when-average-equals-amazing">Ultimate Average Chocolate Chip Cookie</a>. {activity:5wozcrpIP3IpsuZgnhZOoJ} 
{activity:7AxPnb5G3ClWthLphYTxd6}

The Ultimate Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies