I’ve been called the scuba blogger for a long time, so I figured I could use the Extreme Sports Scuba blog to discuss chocolate chip cookies.
Stay with me. There is scuba diving involved. Eventually.
It started with One Cookie.
Chocolate chip cookies have always been my favorite cookie.
Back in 2024, I thought I had found the chocolate chip cookie in Santa Claus, Indiana. It was my favorite. Case closed. Then this year I tried a sourdough chocolate chip cookie that was even better.
Well, darn.
That planted the idea that someday I should sit down, try a bunch of recipes, and figure out which chocolate chip cookie really was the best.
“Someday” arrived a couple of weeks ago when TikTok did what TikTok does best and sent me down a rabbit hole. I found Lily P. Crumbs’ chocolate chip cookie rankings, where she has taken on the completely reasonable task of baking and ranking chocolate chip cookie recipes from across the internet. I picked out a couple of contenders, including Butternut Bakery’s Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies, and started reading. And that’s as far as it went.
Until a few days later. That’s when I stumbled across a TikTok from Stableside Farmstand making a rather confident claim about her chocolate chip cookies: hers were the best.
Naturally, I went to the comments. People asked some version of, “But how do you know yours are better than mine?” Her response? “They are better.” Repeatedly.
I admired the confidence. I also now needed answers.
Then another woman entered the comments claiming that her cookies were even better.
And suddenly this had become a situation.
Obviously, We Needed a Blind Taste Test
I found both recipes, but there was a problem: I absolutely did not need that many chocolate chip cookies sitting in my house. Fortunately, we were headed to Mermet Springs in Metropolis, Illinois, for a weekend of scuba diving with our Extreme Sports Scuba family.
And if you’ve ever spent a weekend diving with us, you already know the basic itinerary:
Dive. Eat. Dive. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.
I had test subjects. So, what began with two recipes somehow became eight. Because apparently, I don’t know when to stop.
Along with the two TikTok contenders, I added Butternut Bakery’s recipe from the larger online cookie ranking. Then I added Memaw’s Chocolate Chip Cookies, my mother-in-law’s recipe that quite a few Extreme Sports Scuba divers already know, simply as “Memaw Cookies.”
Of course, no chocolate chip cookie challenge would be complete without the OG: the original Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip cookie. I also included Sugar Spun Run’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, which I’d previously used for another cookie experiment. It isn’t personally my favorite, but that’s the point of asking other people. I already know what I like.
And then I got ornery. I added Pillsbury refrigerated cookie dough. There’s a reason.
Years ago, my dad entered a chili cook-off. Someone else dumped Hormel chili from a can into a Crock-Pot and entered it.
It won.
Apparently, the judges decided it tasted exactly like chili was supposed to taste. I’ve never forgotten that.
So, Pillsbury went into the competition. And because I was already committed to chaos, contestant number eight was a package of Chewy Chips Ahoy.
The Highly Scientific Method
I labeled the cookies A through H so people wouldn’t know which recipe they were eating. I gave out a few hints about what was hiding among the choices but otherwise kept their identities under wraps.
An index card on the front provided a grid for voting, with each cookie receiving a score from:
1 – Yucky to 5 – Yummy
Very technical terminology.
I wasn’t worried about whether people liked the cookies I’d baked. I followed the recipes. Everyone has different tastes, and that was exactly what I wanted to see. Also, after baking at least a couple dozen cookies from each batch and hauling what can only accurately be described as a buttload of chocolate chip cookies roughly six hours across Missouri and into Illinois, I really just needed people to help eat them.
And the Winner Is…
Well…
We have a three-way tie.
- The original Nestlé Toll House cookie earned an average score of 4.0 out of 5.
- Memaw Cookies: 4.0.
- Pillsbury refrigerated cookie dough: 4.0.
Now, before Pillsbury starts celebrating its stunning victory over the internet’s finest bakers, there’s an asterisk: it received only one vote. But that vote was a four. So technically… Four.
Next came Butternut Bakery’s Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookie at 3.71, followed by a tie between Sugar Spun Run and the Triple Chocolate Chip Cookie that helped start this entire mess, both at 3.67.
The Five-Star Chocolate Chip Cookie—the recipe whose creator had claimed in the TikTok comments that hers were better—finished at 2.5.
And then there was Chips Ahoy. Zero.
Not a zero rating.
Zero participants.
Nobody would even eat one.
The moment the package was opened, that unmistakable Chips Ahoy smell escaped, my supposedly blind taste test ceased being particularly blind, and an entire weekend full of hungry scuba divers collectively decided they had standards.
Honestly, I respect it.
But There Was Another Winner
The numbers say there was a three-way tie. The people told a slightly different story.
Deb knew the Memaw Cookie almost immediately.
So did Jared.
My husband, Mark, said it had been long enough since he’d had one of his mom’s cookies that he wasn’t sure he’d recognize it. He did.
And Addison? She solved the problem of what to do with the remaining Memaw Cookies by stealing them at the end of the weekend and bringing them home. They were her favorite.
So, while the official experiment produced a tie, I think it accidentally demonstrated something else about food—and maybe something about diving, too.
Sometimes the “best” isn’t determined by a recipe ranking, TikTok comments, expensive ingredients, or somebody confidently insisting that theirs is better.
Sometimes you know the best one the second you bite into it.
It’s familiar.
It tastes like something you’ve had a hundred times before.
It tastes like home.
So What Did We Learn?
First, the internet takes chocolate chip cookies very seriously.
Second, if you’re going to make eight different kinds of cookies, a dive weekend is a remarkably effective place to dispose of them.
Third, scuba divers apparently can resist free food if that food smells sufficiently like Chips Ahoy.
And finally, weekends like this are one of the things I’ve always loved about Extreme Sports Scuba.
Yes, we went to Mermet Springs to dive. We dove. We ate. We dove some more. We ate some more. Somewhere in there, a completely unnecessary chocolate chip cookie experiment took over part of the weekend.
And nobody thought that was particularly strange.
Maybe that’s because after enough trips together, dive buddies become friends, friends become family, and eventually someone shows up after driving six hours with an unreasonable number of cookies and asks you to rate them on a scale from “Yucky” to “Yummy.” You eat the cookie. Because that’s what family does.
And for anyone wondering whether I finally discovered the world’s best chocolate chip cookie?
Nope.
Which unfortunately means I’m probably going to have to do this again.