This New Chocolate Claims to Make the Best Cookies — We Put It to the Test
There was a clear winner (and some great runners-up)!
Esther Chou/Getty Images
By Leah Brickley for Food Network Kitchen
Chocolate chips, also known as morsels, have been mass-produced and stirred into cookie dough since 1941, a few years after the invention of the chocolate chip cookie at the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. Since then, options have included chocolate chunks and coins, though some now believe that a hand-chopped chocolate bar is the superb choice for the best chocolate chip cookies. With all these appealing options, how could we do any better? Well, Tesla engineer Remy Labesque and CEO of San Francisco-based Dandelion Chocolate, Todd Masonis, thought there was still room for improvement.
Labesque and Masonis' chief compliant about chocolate chip morsels is their inherit heavy-bottomed shape, stating that the morsels are more likely to stick in your teeth than melt in your mouth. (And Labesque and Masonis believe you can't truly enjoy chocolate without it melting in your mouth.) It took three years to design, but the engineer and chocolatier duo think they've come up with a more perfect chocolate chip, which Dandelion Chocolate has dubbed a facet. Each facet is polygonal in shape with two tapered sides that melt instantly while the thicker center holds it shape. To see if these facets really reign supreme, I decided to team up with a self-confessed 10-year-old chocoholic to compare. We tested chocolate morsels, chunks, chopped chocolate and Dandelion's facets.
How We Tested
We followed the classic Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe and divided the raw dough into four equal parts, stirring three ounces of each type of chocolate into each one. We portioned, baked and cooled each batch the same. We used semi-sweet morsels, chunks and chopped chocolate. The Dandelion facets are only available in small-batch, single-origin, and we chose the 70% chocolate from Belize. Because of this, the percentage of cocoa could not be standardized across our experiment.
Our Taste Test
We tasted the cookies at three different cooling phases. The first taste was after 15 minutes on a cooling rack, the second was once the cookies had cooled completely, and, lastly, we tasted them after they sat overnight at room temperature in an air-tight container.
Morsels: We both wished there were more chocolate chips in each cookie. The chocolate was sweet but not too much. The chips in the warm cookie lacked gooeyness, and the cooled cookie's chocolate didn’t melt in your mouth. The same was true for the cookies we tasted the next day.
Chunks: The chocolate-chip-to-cookie ratio was a bit off, and we would have both liked more of the sweet chunks. The warm cookie's chocolate was slightly gooier than the morsels, but we had the same experience with the other two cookies — the chocolate did not melt in our mouths but rather stuck to our teeth.
Chopped: My fellow tester got a little carried away with chopping the chocolate, so the pieces were a little on the small side. This resulted in the most balanced chocolate-to-dough ratio. The chocolate was sweet and melted in our mouths when the cookies were warm. It did more so than morsels and chunks when we tasted the fully cooled cookies and the cookies the next day.
Facets: The facets are quite large and heavy, so there was less volume of chocolate compared to the morsels, which gave the impression of more dough than chocolate. The chocolate had sophisticated and bittersweet floral notes, which my tasting partner did not love. When the cookies baked, the facets congregated in the center and didn’t spread with the batter in the hot oven. The facets in the warm cookie were uber gooey, and the ones in the cooled cookie and next-day cookie melted in your mouth and held their shape at the same time.
Comparing Old and New Chocolate
The difference between the newer facets and older chocolate morsels was night and day. The morsels were almost hard to find in each cookie and didn't melt in your mouth. The facets were in your face with chocolate gooeyness and melted in your mouth while also holding their shape.
The Winners (and Runners-Up)
After much debate, we agreed that chopped chocolate was the winner. It was gooey in the warm cookies and melted in our mouths in both cooled cookies. However, if the facets had been semi-sweet and the flavor profile a little more kid-friendly, there may have been a tie (or potentially a different winner!).
Chocolate chunks came in third. Although they didn't melt in our mouths when cooled, we both liked the extra burst of chocolate.
Sorry, morsels. We appreciate your many years of service but we're going to chop our chocolate from now on. (That is, unless the cookies are for grown-ups or a special occasion, then we might splurge on some of Dandelion Chocolate facets, which are $30 for 17.6 ounces.)
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