Recipe News: How do the best chocolate chip cookie recipes stack up?

When it comes to chocolate chip cookies, people want to be carried away by the masterful blend of buttery dough, sweet vanilla and creamy chocolate that mark a perfect homemade cookie. Chocolatier Jacques Torres gives you that and a chewy, crisp-around-the-edges texture to boot. In a blind taste test of six chocolate chip cookie recipes, his was the runaway winner, regardless of the testers’ age, background or culinary knowledge. My search for the ultimate chocolate chip cookie began after I tasted a particularly good example. Was it the buttery flavor that made the cookie so good, I wondered, or the oozing chocolate? And what recipe, I wanted to know, would produce the cookie of my dreams? In my search for the ultimate chocolate chip cookie, I started with recipes for six cookies, each with its own claim to fame. They were prepared with the same brand of ingredients, scooped the same size and baked in the same oven on identical cookie sheets. Only the amounts of ingredients and preparation techniques varied. When nuts were called for in recipes, we omitted them. My first choice for the tasting was the original Toll House Cookie from Nestlé, the one that started the chocolate chip cookie craze back in the 1930s when Ruth Wakefield of Whitman, Mass., added a chopped-up chocolate bar to her Butter Drop Do Cookies. To her surprise, and to the delight of cookie lovers since, the chocolate didn’t melt into the cookie but softened to a lush texture instead. Wakefield’s recipe has graced the back of packages of Nestlé semisweet chocolate morsels since 1939. Second on the must-make list was the ever-popular Mrs. Field’s/Neiman Marcus clone, the supposedly secret recipe made with ground oatmeal that has spawned more urban legends than you can shake a wooden spoon at. Next was Martha Stewart’s recipe. Could any tasting be complete without the doyenne of cooking’s recipe? Fourth was the chocolate chip cookie recipe from Cook’s Illustrated, the publication that tests dozens of recipes to come up with what they call the perfect one.