Introducing the Serious Eats New York Chocolate Chip Cookie Championships

Who is the tastiest cookie of them all? [Photo: Robyn Lee]

Let's be honest: it's hard to make a bad chocolate chip cookie. Anytime you've got something sweet, warm, and chocolatey emerging from the oven, odds are it's going to taste great.

And yet there's that perfect cookie we all dream about. A precise balance of buttery, sweet, and salty. Fine chocolate that plays a big part but doesn't overwhelm. And perhaps most important, it's crisp around the edges but soft and melty in the middle.

At Serious Eats, we're on a constant quest for that Platonic ideal of a cookie. So we decided to formalize our efforts to find New York's best. Much as we'd love to pit 40 or 50 cookies against each other in a blind tasting, we didn't think even our professional sweet teeth could take it. Thus we've broken it into rounds, playoff-style. The result? The Serious Eats New York Chocolate Chip Cookie Championships.

Our methodology and the first installation, after the jump.

We'll be breaking the city into four chunks—Uptown, Midtown, Downtown, and Outer Boroughs—and doing a blind taste-test of the best cookies from each region. Then, we'll enter the winners from each round into one grand final tasting.

First up? Uptown. Here's our first installation.