FOOD HOLIDAY: Chocolate Chip Cookie Tasting

May 15, 2013 at 8:51 am · Filed under Food Holidays

We celebrated with four very different
chocolate chip cookies. Photo by Elvira
Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

May 15th is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, and chocolate chip is America’s favorite cookie. Our friends at Balducci’s specialty food store sent us three different brands of small-producer chocolate chip cookies for the occasion. Added to a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies already in house, we had quite a chocolate chip cookie tasting.

Gather up a selection and hold your own cookie tasting. Go to the best specialty food store in town and purchase four or five different varieties; call friends and neighbors for a tasting with tea, coffee and/or milk.

If all you‘ve got is a conventional supermarket, that works, too. No matter who makes the cookie, you’re looking for differences in chocolatiness, butteriness, sweetness, texture and other variables (we prefer a cookie with more brown sugar flavor, for example).

Don’t judge a cookie by its wrapper: You don’t know until you take the first bite. We tasted four very different chocolate chip cookies:

Balducci’s Double Chocolate Chip Cookies. These private label cookies (made by an cookie manufacturer and labeled with the Balducci’s name instead of the manufacturer’s), were O.K. but not standouts. Our favorite double chocolate chip cookie is from Levain Bakery.

The Cookie makes a soft, chewy cookie with Maldon sea salt. It has all the right ingredients on the label but doesn’t taste artisanal to us. We missed notes of butter and a lack of brown sugar flavor (which is purely a personal preference). We don’t mean to nitpick, but the extra large, four-inch diameter struck us as overkill, too. From Salt Of The Earth Bakery.

Pepperidge Farm Dark Chocolate Cheesecake Cookies. This cookie is the standout in Peppepridge Farm’s new Dessert Shop cookie line (there are also carrot cake and Boston cream pie flavors). A soft style with large chunks of chocolate and cream cheese drops, it adapts the zebra brownie (half brownie, half cheesecake) very nicely.

Pick up an assortment from your specialty food store. Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

Tate’s Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookie. Surprise: This was our favorite of all four cookies. You wouldn’t know it was gluten free; very thin and crisp, in the style of Tate’s Bake Shop of Southampton, New York, it had us rushing out to buy more.

HISTORY OF THE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE

The chocolate chip cookie was invented by accident in 1937, by an innkeeper who stirred a chopped chocolate bar into cookie batter, thinking it would melt to create chocolate cookies. The happy result was that it didn’t!

Here’s the full history of the chocolate chip cookie.

FIND MORE OF OUR FAVORITE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES IN OUR GOURMET COOKIES SECTION.

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