She Said They Were the Best… So Obviously I Had to Try Them

There are certain words you probably shouldn’t use around me unless you’re prepared for me to question them.

The best is apparently one of them.

I was scrolling TikTok when I came across a video from Stable Side Farmstand about her chocolate chip cookies. Not just really good chocolate chip cookies. Not her favorite chocolate chip cookies.

The BEST chocolate chip cookies.

That’s a pretty bold claim.

Apparently I wasn’t the only person who thought so, because people in the comments were asking some version of the same question running through my head: But how do you know yours are the best? What if mine are better?

She stood by it.

Hers were the best.

Well, okay then.

I’d already been wanting to do another chocolate chip cookie challenge, and suddenly I knew at least one recipe that absolutely had to be included.

You can see the TikTok that started it all and decide whether you’d have been able to resist that challenge any better than I did.

Finding the Recipe

It took a little hunting, but I eventually found Stable Side Farmstand’s Triple Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.

And admittedly, there were some things about this recipe that immediately made it interesting.

First: browned butter.

I’ve made browned butter a handful of times, but it’s definitely not something I use regularly. I actually think this batch may have been my best attempt at browning butter yet, so I’m calling that a win regardless of anything else that happened during this ridiculous cookie experiment.

Then there was the chocolate.

These aren’t called Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies because there are three lonely chocolate chips sitting on top. The recipe uses dark chocolate, semisweet chocolate and milk chocolate chips—a full cup of each. That’s three cups of chocolate chips in one batch of cookies.

Oddly enough, they didn’t taste overwhelmingly chocolatey to me.

And I’m not even a huge chocolate person.

I also really liked the combination of the three chocolates. When I was a kid, I hated semisweet chocolate chips and always wanted milk chocolate. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gone almost completely the opposite direction and tend to prefer dark chocolate.

Apparently the solution was just to throw all three of them into the same cookie.

These Are Not Emergency Chocolate Chip Cookies

There is one thing you need to know before you decide at 8 p.m. that these sound delicious and you’re going to make them.

You’re not eating them at 8:30.

Or probably even that night.

You have to brown the butter, let it cool, make the dough and then refrigerate it. Stable Side’s recipe actually calls for refrigerating the scooped dough overnight—or for up to two days.

I started mine early in the morning and refrigerated the dough for about eight hours before baking them that evening. For my purposes, that was close enough to “overnight,” and more importantly, it worked with my slightly insane two-day cookie-baking schedule.

Still, sometimes when you want a chocolate chip cookie, you want a chocolate chip cookie now.

This isn’t that recipe.

This is a plan ahead for your chocolate chip cookie recipe.

I Didn’t Follow Everything Exactly

Stable Side recommends Caputo Italian 00 flour with this recipe.

I used Kirkland all-purpose flour from Costco.

Why?

Because that’s what I had.

By the time I decided to do this challenge, I didn’t have time to track down special Italian flour for one batch of chocolate chip cookies. I was already about to bake seven different homemade chocolate chip cookie recipes in two days. There was a limit to my insanity.

Maybe the flour makes a difference. I genuinely don’t know. If you want to reproduce her cookies as closely as possible, by all means, try the flour she recommends.

I also skipped the optional flaky sea salt on top. That’s simply personal preference. I don’t particularly care for flaky salt on my chocolate chip cookies.

Maybe it would change the cookie. Again, I don’t know.

And I Didn’t Make Them Quite as Huge

The original recipe calls for ¼-cup balls of cookie dough and makes 16–20 large cookies.

That’s a BIG cookie.

We’re talking roughly Subway-cookie territory.

Under normal circumstances, maybe that’s exactly what you want. But I wasn’t baking these under normal circumstances. I was making cookies for a bunch of scuba divers who were going to have several different chocolate chip cookies available to try.

Handing everyone eight enormous bakery-size cookies seemed a little excessive.

Even for me.

So I used my normal cookie scoop, which I believe is around a tablespoon and a half.

And somewhere during this whole chocolate chip cookie adventure, I also broke another cookie scoop.

I have broken an embarrassing number of those stupid things.

I don’t even know what I’m doing to them anymore.

Despite making these smaller than Stable Side recommends, they were still good-sized, thick cookies. And that matters to me because I don’t like a flat chocolate chip cookie. I want some height. I want some substance.

These delivered on that.

They were darker than your average chocolate chip cookie, thick, round and honestly just really pretty cookies.

Obviously I Had to Try One Warm

My goal was actually not to eat all of these cookies as I made them.

For one thing, I needed to have enough left for everyone else.

For another, I was baking seven homemade chocolate chip cookie recipes over the course of two days.

I like chocolate chip cookies. They’re my favorite cookie.

But there are limits.

I was trying to be good and save them for the weekend when one of the Stable Side cookies got a little mangled while I was taking it off the pan.

Well.

We couldn’t serve that one.

Obviously.

So I tried it warm, my husband helped with the evidence, and my daughter eventually got one after they’d cooled.

Try keeping your family out of the kitchen while batch after batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies are coming out of the oven. It’s not easy.

So…How Were They?

Good.

They were definitely good.

The browned butter gave them a distinctive flavor compared with a more traditional chocolate chip cookie, and I liked it. I’m probably not the person who’s going to give you an eloquent description of all the subtle flavor notes of browned butter because I just haven’t worked with it enough.

It tasted good.

There you go. Quality food blogging right there.

I also liked getting the milk, semisweet, and dark chocolate together. For me, that was probably one of the more interesting parts of the recipe, and I could actually taste the difference between them rather than having all that chocolate disappear into one generic chocolate flavor.

Would I make these again?

Absolutely.

Would I make them as gigantic as the original recipe calls for?

Maybe, if I were making just these cookies and wanted a big bakery-style cookie. A ¼-cup scoop of cookie dough is a commitment, though. That’s not a casual little cookie. That’s I have chosen chocolate chip cookie as my mealterritory.

And right now?

I don’t particularly want to make any chocolate chip cookie.

I never thought I’d say that.

I baked seven different homemade recipes in two days, packed them up, hauled them with us on a ridiculously hot September weekend, and spent three days surrounded by containers of chocolate chip cookies while our scuba friends tried them.

I may need some time.

But once enough time has passed that the sight of chocolate chips doesn’t make me question my life choices, I’d actually like to revisit some of these recipes individually. No challenge. No seven batches in two days. No trying to keep track of a kitchen full of cookies.

Just make one recipe because I want a chocolate chip cookie.

And Stable Side’s Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies are absolutely one I’d make again.

As for that original claim that got me into this mess in the first place?

The BEST?

We’re not answering that yet.