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!
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.
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.
