I Baked Both Ree Drummond's and Nestlé’s Chocolate Chip Cookies, and One Recipe Stunned Me

There are thousands of chocolate chip cookie recipes out there, and for good reason. Cookies only require a few ingredients, but there are endless ways to tweak those ingredients in the quest for the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

For example, I've found that using more flour makes cookies chewier. Browning the butter and using chocolate chunks creates that bakery-style cookie we all love. Adding just a touch of water? That makes them thinner and crispier.

My personal quest for the ideal chocolate chip cookie is so never-ending that I've recently put two popular cookies that share very similar base ingredients head-to-head.

I already know and love the classic Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies, but how does it compare to Ree Drummond's Chocolate Chip Cookies? And does either recipe take home the title of the only chocolate chip cookie recipe you'll ever need?

Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’ve made this recipe more times than I can count. It’s the foundation for nearly every other chocolate chip cookie recipe out there.

I started by creaming softened butter with equal amounts of brown sugar and granulated sugar. Then I added two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla extract to the mixture. After that, I folded in the dry ingredients: all-purpose flour, baking soda, and salt. Finally, I stirred in the Nestlé Toll House semi-sweet chocolate chips.

The dough gets scooped into "rounded tablespoons." I used a one-and-a-half-tablespoon cookie scoop and baked them on an ungreased baking sheet at 375°F for nine to 11 minutes.

Ree Drummond's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Once baked and cooled, the cookies look perfectly homemade: small with rugged edges and bumpy tops. The texture is soft in the middle with a delicate crisp edge. They taste buttery and a little too sweet, but the tiny chips kept that in check—a four-bite cookie, at best, and a very nostalgic one.

Like the Toll House recipe, Ree Drummond's version starts with softened butter and equal amounts of brown and granulated sugar, but Ree uses 2/3 cup of each instead of 3/4 cup. 

Again, two eggs are added to the butter mixture, but this cookie calls for a full tablespoon of vanilla extract. The same measure of flour, baking soda, and salt is used in the cookie dough, but Drummond calls for eight ounces of chopped semi-sweet chocolate and four ounces of chopped dark chocolate instead of chips. 

These cookies are scooped into quarter-cup rounds, fit six to a parchment paper sheet pan, and receive a flourish of flaky salt on top before being refrigerated. Yes, these cookies need to be chilled for a minimum of 20 minutes before baking. 

Although the cookies are larger in size and chilled, they are baked at a lower oven temperature of 350°F for 17 to 19 minutes.

The finished cookies are gorgeous! A slightly puffed, topped with shiny pools of chocolate. The texture is soft like a cake, and there is a generous edge of crispy cookie since they're nearly four times the size of the Toll House cookies.

The Winner: Ree Drummond's Chocolate Chip Cookies

While I do love the classic cookie that is Nestlé Tollhouse, I admit that Ree’s cookie base with slightly less sugar was more buttery and less sweet in a good way. That, paired with the combination of dark and semi-sweet chocolate, kept me from getting fatigued with the cookies' flavor despite their larger size. I couldn't believe Ree's cookies beat the iconic Nestlé recipe.

The extra efforts in Ree’s cookie—chopping the chocolate, chilling the dough rounds, and baking fewer cookies per tray—had a satisfying payoff in the finished cookie’s taste, texture, and appearance.

The next time I make these, I might opt for all semi-sweet chunks to appease my dark chocolate-hating kids, but these chocolate chip cookies are the new standard in my house.