Tessa’s Recipe Overview Flavor: Abundant sweet vanilla and butterscotch notes, complemented by just the right amount of chocolate chips. Texture: Thick and chewy, with slightly crisp edges and ample gooey chocolate chips. Simplicity: Easy 30-minute recipe. Why You’ll Adore This Recipe: These are my favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies — I’ve made this recipe countless times! I always keep this dough in my freezer, ready to bake whenever I get a craving. This post may include affiliate links. Please read our disclosure policy. My Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies are thick, chewy, and gooey. My passion lies with chocolate chip cookies. You may think I'm a bit obsessed, but I’ve tried this specific recipe over 20 times, testing nearly every variation conceivable to bring you the ultimate chocolate chip cookie! The effort has paid off, as this is now one of the MOST popular recipes on my site, attracting over seven million visitors and receiving 1,000 five-star reviews. Why Is This the BEST Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe? My recipe is straightforward enough to whip up on a weeknight, using no elaborate ingredients. It has been thoroughly tested, resulting in beautifully golden brown cookies, crisp on the edges and slightly gooey in the center. I’ve even made these cookies on The Today Show! A Sprinkle of Science How to Create the Best Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies Key Ingredient Insights Understanding how basic baking components function can boost your kitchen confidence. I've selected each ingredient after extensive testing, ensuring that every one is vital. All-Purpose Flour, Measured Accurately I highly recommend using a digital kitchen scale to weigh your flour or the spoon-and-level method. It’s surprisingly easy to accidentally measure too much flour using cups, which can lead to cookies that don’t spread, are cakey, or turn out dry. Baking Soda is Essential for Golden Brown Cookies After extensive testing, I decided to use only baking soda for leavening in this recipe, resulting in perfectly golden brown cookies with the right amount of spread to bake evenly. Baking powder and baking soda are not interchangeable — refer to the experiment image above. Learn more in my Baking Soda vs. Baking Powder article here. Never Omit the Salt! There was one occasion when my husband, Joe, forgot to add salt to this recipe. I realized something was off just after my first bite! Cookies without salt taste flat and dull. I prefer fine sea salt because its flavor is preferable to iodized table salt, and its finer granule size mixes into the dough more uniformly than kosher salt. I often sprinkle these cookies with flaky sea salt right out of the oven for a delightful salty-sweet contrast. Butter at the Right Temperature (This is CRUCIAL!) One common mistake among cookie bakers is allowing their butter to warm too much before the cookie dough goes into the oven. This can cause your cookies to spread into sad, flat puddles. The ideal temperature is about 67°F, where the butter will yield slightly when pressed but isn’t too warm or greasy. I opt for unsalted butter in my baking since it tends to be fresher than salted butter (salt acts as a preservative), and it permits me full control over the salt content. If you only have salted butter, no problem. Just reduce the salt in this recipe by half (½ teaspoon). Granulated Sugar Also known as white sugar, it encourages more spread, so I use only a small amount. Brown Sugar Brown sugar contains molasses, contributing to the favored butterscotch flavor found in chocolate chip cookies. This molasses attracts more moisture, resulting in thicker, softer, and chewier cookies that maintain freshness longer. Key Point: Do not decrease the sugar in this recipe! If you do, you’ll end up with dry, crumbly “hockey puck” cookies that won’t spread. You can learn more about sugar’s role in baking here (hint: it does more than simply add sweetness). The Eggs Essential for binding the cookie dough, eggs also contribute extra protein and fat for richness and stability. If necessary, you can replace the eggs with 50 grams of plain, unflavored, unsweetened yogurt. Again, don’t skip this ingredient! It adds a sweet aroma that signals our brains that something wonderful is on the way. Cookies lacking vanilla tend to fall flat. Chocolate Chips I favor semisweet chocolate chips (Ghirardelli or Guittard are my top picks) due to their ideal sweetness that balances the cookie's other flavors. If you prefer milk or bittersweet chocolate, feel free to substitute. If you'd like fewer chocolate chips, cut back to 1 ½ cups, but be aware that your cookies may be slightly thinner. If you want to use chocolate chunks, simply swap in the same amount! Recommended Equipment The Best Baking Pan for Cookies All cookies shown below came from the