Taste Test

The Best Chocolate Chips for Baking Cookies and More

We tasted 17 brands of semisweet and bittersweet chocolate chips to determine the best ones for cookies, trail mix, pancakes, and more.
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Photo by Chelsea Kyle

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Our all-around favorite chocolate chips are Ghirardelli 60% Cacao Premium Baking Chips. They scored a full 10 points higher than our next highest-scoring chocolate chips during our recent staff taste test. But let's be honest: of the 17 varieties we sampled, there were very few chocolate morsels that we'd turn away. And that's because chocolate—even bad chocolate—is delicious. At least that's how the saying goes; what we discovered on our hunt for the best chocolate chips, however, is that it isn't always true. For our methodology and the full list of chocolate chips we tasted, scroll to the bottom of the page; first up, the rankings!

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This 2-Minute Cookie Is Far Too Easy to Make

Our Favorite Chocolate Chips: Ghirardelli Bittersweet

Many of the chips we tasted were bland and chalky, with a grainy crunch from too much sugar. Not these. Eaten on their own, they have a good balance of bitterness and sweetness, backed by complex fruity undertones and a subtle, pleasant tang—a natural result of chocolate fermentation—that deepens and brightens the taste. What that translates to when baked is rich, nuanced flavor that contrasts wonderfully with the sweet cookie base. They're also flatter and wider than standard-issue chips, which means each chip takes up more real estate in the cookies, resulting in a more even spread of chocolate throughout. Once baked, they remained soft, gooey, molten puddles longer than any other chip we tasted.

BUY IT: Ghirardelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate Premium Baking Chips, $6 for a 20-ounce bag on Jet

The Best Chips for Beautiful Cookies: Scharffen Berger Baking Chunks

There was great debate among the team about including these.....un-chips. That's because rather than anything resembling the classic chocolate chip drop shape, these are irregular rectangular pieces that mimic the effect of chopping up a solid bar of chocolate (making them ideal for our favorite chocolate chip muffins). They were some of the darkest chips we tasted, at 62% cacao, which meant that they had deeply bitter undertones—some tasters thought too bitter. Others, namely Emily Johnson, praised the "notes of berry, and deep—almost savory—chocolate." All that aside, the cookies we baked with them were ad campaign–worthy. Those chunks melted into rippled pools of chocolate that spread throughout the cookies, making perfectly sporadic bursts of rich flavor, and resulting in effortless cookies that looked like they came out of a top-tier bakery.

BUY IT: Scharffen Berger 62% Cacao Semisweet Dark Chocolate Baking Chunks, $7 for a 6-ounce bag on Amazon

Truth: this test was just an excuse for us to gorge ourselves on chocolate chip cookies and forget about our troubles.

Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Food Styling by Joe Sevier

The Best Chocolate Chips for Snacking: Guittard Super Cookie Chips

We loved these wide, squat chips for their supremely creamy mouthfeel, which is almost like that of milk chocolate. They have wonderful flavor, with a distinct vanilla kick and coffee-like undertones. The cookies we made with them were a little splotchy, but the flavor was complex (if a little less intense than the first two options). Where we think they would really shine is in raw preparations—such as a chocolate-studded trail mix, where the large, not-entirely-uniform pieces would add grippable, textural contract against the granola clusters, pretzels, and other mix-ins.

BUY IT: Guittard 48% Semisweet Chocolate Super Cookie Chips, $5 for a 10-ounce bag at Whole Foods

The Best Chocolate Chips With Classic Shape: Guittard Semisweet

At 46% cacao, these chips are less complex than the chips above, but have good, real chocolate flavor. They're creamy and not too sweet, as so many classically-shaped chips proved to be, with a slightly bitter finish. We thought the chips stayed a little too solid when baked into cookies, but if you simply must have that flat-bottomed teardrop shape, these are the chips for you.

BUY IT: Guittard 46% Cacao Semisweet Chocolate Baking Chips, $4 on Amazon

What We Were Looking For

We opened up our search to anything labeled "bittersweet" or "semisweet"—since the government doesn't distinguish between the two—as well as the even more ambiguous "dark" chocolate. Because there's no formal delineation between semi- and bitter-, one brand's mid-range chocolate may have a higher cacao percentage than another's darkest option. This is evidenced in our winners, above: although semisweet is generally thought of as having less cacao and more sugar than bittersweet, Scharffen Berger's semisweet contains 62% cacao solids, while Ghirardelli's bittersweet contains just 60%. (For the record, Scharffen Berger's "bittersweet" option contains 70% cacao solids.)

Photo of a salted butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.
My Grandmother's Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe, and How I Tried to Improve It

Regardless of cacao percentage, that chocolate had to taste good on its own, since we're definitely going to steal a few nibbles while we're making edible cookie dough or chocolate-studded banana cake. We wanted a chocolate with complex flavor: it could have notes of berry, banana, or other fruits (all natural, dependent on the cacao's point of origin) and needed a good balance of bitterness to sweetness. Any chocolate deemed too cloyingly sweet—or worse, with crunchy sugar granules that made the chips feel grainy on the tongue—were out.

When baked into cookies, the chocolate had to maintain its good flavor—or better yet, develop it further. It also needed to disperse throughout the cookie, melting slightly but retaining some shape—one of the chips we baked into cookies didn't melt at all, which is actually pretty alarming when you think about it.

How We Tested

Chocolate chips were stored at room temperature (in the Epi offices, which is usually a bit chilly TBH) and then tasted straight out of the bag. We didn't pay too much attention to the chips' varying shininess since we recently learned from a chocolate expert that the instead of bloom, the white marks on chocolate chips could just as well be scuff marks due to the friction of chip against chip during transport. The top five chips from the first round of tasting were baked into Our Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies and tasted again.

All samples were tasted by a panel of Epicurious editors in a blind tasting and no distinction was made between organic and non-organic products during testing.

The Other Chocolate Chips We Tasted

In alphabetical order:

All products featured on Epicurious are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.