Consumer Reports picks the best chocolate chip cookies
Stop! Don’t eat that chocolate chip cookie! Spit it out!
Spitting out the cookie, after tasting it, is the secret to being a “sensory panelist” at Consumer Reports magazine, which — just over an hour ago — officially released the findings of its report on packaged chocolate chip cookies.
The “sensory panelists,” I learned from Consumer Reports’ Erin Godeux, don’t actually eat any of the cookies they test — in this case, samples from 13 national brands — because the object of the testing is not to be satiated. “Once you feel full, foods don’t often taste as good,” Godeux said. (I should have that problem!) After testing cookies for three hours, the panel would be sick of chocolate cookies.
So the panelists take a bite, “evaluate their perceptions according to an intensity scale,” and spit the masticated cookie right out. The visuals are none too appetizing, but I’m in the eating — not spitting — business. Anyway, according to the magazine article, “a top-rated cookie is well-blended, flavorful, and has a good chip-to-cookie ratio.”
The winning cookies surprised me, probably because I never buy these two brands for myself: Health Valley’s Mini (I would never buy a cookie that had the word health connected to it) and Keebler’s Deluxe Original. I grew up eating Keebler’s cookies so I’m intimately acquainted with the Deluxe Original (which I think used to be bigger back in the 1960s), which are perfectly uniform, incredibly sugary little circles — but they are packed with chips.
According to the Consumer Reports story: “Health Valley’s cookies were slightly buttery, while the Keebler cookies were a little like shortbread and cost 22 cents a serving, about half as much as their competitor.”
Well, not today anyway. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the Consumer Report cookie evaluation, but Cosentino’s Market had Nabisco’s Chips Ahoy! brand marked down so low, it would have been a scandal not to buy a package. Unfortunately, I prefer the chewy Chips Ahoy! cookies (and bought them) and Consumer Reports put Chips Ahoy! Real Chocolate Chip Cookies and Real Chocolate Reduced Fat in the “Good” category, although noted that both of those cookies will be made with different ingredients this summer; the chewy cookies didn’t make the list.
A Keebler cookie that also didn’t make the list, probably because it’s not really a chocolate chip cookie in the classic sense, is their Chocolate Malt Chunk cookie. I love them, even if they are “naturally and artificially flavored” and two cookies contain 9 grams of fat. So does the Deluxe Original Cookie, for that matter. But you can’t get fat from just biting into one and spitting it out.
Not that I would dream of doing that.
(Image via Flickr: a.pinkmermaid)
