I want to see Nate make three more batches: one again with just basic ingredients, one with all brand ingredients, and a final one with only the four most notably different ingredients from this video.
I appreciate the fact that you weighted some of the ingredients and tried to explain. I switched to weighing a lot of my ingredients for baking a few years back and have noticed a difference. Especially with my bread making. Weighing really is better than using measuring cups.
I personally find weighing easier and quicker too. No need to faff around trying to level your ingredients in measuring cups and spoons lol. Plus, it's the only way to really get that consistency every time.
America is really the only place where people bake without weighing ingredients. It’s honestly a bit of a weird practice, especially if you are trying for consistency. With modern scales, weighing isn’t a hassle at all.
This is a great follow up! Isolating each ingredient is definitely the best way to determine what makes the difference for better cookies but I agree with what others have said: 3 more batches should be a final comparison between brand, basic, and selective brand cookies!
i think to further test this you should make the expensive batch, but replace each ingredient with the cheaper one. see if missing the ingredient makes the cookie worse, rather than seeing if adding it makes it better. maybe good for part three
I love this series of videos. Very similar to Barry Lewis’ cheap vs steep. I really enjoy the difference in approach from the two, the scientific approach of trying to define the actual better ingredients was interesting.
As a meal prep and coffee enthusiast. I strongly support and encourage weighing your food instead of using a volumetric measurement. Thank you for not bowing to the crowd. Weight doesn’t change volumetric measurements do.
Even the same "quantity" is going to be controversial or at least complex for certain ingredients. Higher protein flours require more hydration to achieve the correct result, cheap butter has more water and less fat which ought to be accounted for in the recipe somewhere, salt crystal shape impacts volume measurement greatly but often too little to weigh accurately on a home scale.
in a regular oven, its generally best to bake your cookies on the top shelf. So having two batches, on two different levels at the same time will yield two different texture results. best to do one batch at a time, at the same height in the oven. unless youre using a very high quality convection oven. the recipe breakdown is super solid! lots of fun! thanks man!
While chocolate chips can vary drastically in quality, I think the ingredient people don't expect to make a difference is the brown sugar. I have cooked for enough decades now to know that what is often sold as brown sugar now is not what it was when those recipes were written. Light brown sugar used to be darker and more moist. So, for a better outcome use what is labeled as dark brown sugar. It makes a difference.
I loved this Nate, the big one for me was butter, I've been thinking about changing buttter in a Christmas cookie recipe that I have made for years. Very interesting no one picked that out! Thank you:)
I figured, butter, the chips and brown sugar. We have seen a vast improvement in our cookies when we started to make homemade brown sugar. The cookie dough almost has a mousse like consistency, even after sitting in the fridge overnight.
Hey Nate you could do a TH-cam short showing a cup of flour compacted and then a cup of flour just fluffy and the weights between the two. showing that measuring a cup of flour by weight is a better form of measurement than by size.
Big part of the Vanilla is that the Vanilla plant is actually a bit expensive, so Vanilla Extract is gonna be the expensive option, but the imitation/artificial vanilla is gonna be a lot cheaper. While chemically it's the same, how both are processed, environment they're in can make very subtle changes in the flavor.
I love watching your BvB episodes. Me wife and I always try and predict what's the most important ingredient before you start your own taste testing. It's fun.
The salt matters based on grain size; I have separate cooking salt and cookie salt, 'cause coarse-grain cookie salt won't completely dissolve, so it leaves tiny tastable grains in the finished cookies.
I like the way you stick pretty close to scientific method. I want to do that sometime, but don’t have the time and patience unless it’s directly related to what I’m doing.
Has nothing to do with cost. Growing up making cookies with grandma, a finer grain sugar, a bread flour vs cake flour vs all purpose, and dark vs light brown sugar, effect the outcome.
Alright now do a test with a control batch, a batch with all the control ingredients but with the flour, brown sugar, butter, vanilla and chocolate swapped for the better ingredients, and an expensive batch.
I was so with you on the butter! Very interesting that it's brown sugar. I would also be curious to see browned butter vs. straight from the package, but that's kind of a different experiment. I learned I'll keep buying the store brand for most stuff, but I'll be upgrading my brown sugar next time!
Noticed a difference on the flours... largely because I switched from bleached to unbleached a while ago and found it improved baking noticably, even when buying the store brand unbleached flour. I even prefer generic unbleached to name brand bleached flour. Not at all surprised by the sugar, either, I've been playing around with different sugars and sugar blends for a while (keep turbinado and caster sugar around standard, now, if there's a call for dark brown I can always add in a smidgen of molasses or such).
Great series! I love brand versus basic. That said you are a brave scientist who is also a glutton for punishment. Eleven batches of cookies seems crazy but your pain is our gain. So thank you very much.
I'm not surprised about the chocolate chips, vanilla, and brown sugar. Brown sugar has molasses in it, making it more moist (chewier cookie), real vanilla vs. artificial vanilla makes a difference in flavour, and chocolate chips can make or break the recipe (the higher the cocoa, the more rich the flavour, BUT milk chocolate has more sugar in it so it makes the recipe sweeter). I would love to see this test done using lard substituted for butter and using different types of chocolate chips (Nestlé Toll House, Hershey's, Great Value, etc...) and milk chocolate vs. dark chocolate vs. white chips (or flavoured ones just for a challenge).
My guess were that brown sugar and butter would make a difference. Vanilla extract I was a bit curious about, but didn't think it would really matter. Flour, eggs, sugar, salt, baking soda and the rest I didn't think would make much of a difference. Well I got one right... ish... Brown sugar really varies in taste. It can be a deep musty taste or a light "springy" (?) taste or anything between. It wouldn't surprise me if you could find both cheap and expensive versions of both. Butter can also vary a lot, but I'm not sure how much that carries over in taste after it has been cooked. This time it doesn't seem like it made any noticeable difference. Per haps making a taste test of butter would be interesting. Make sandwiches using a few different brands of butter, fry pieces of bread in the same brands, perhaps bake cookies as a last test and see what differences your friends can taste if any. It would be a very narrow test, not necessarily one that could determine what butter is the best, but it could tell you just how important the brand is for the taste of a dish, and if it's worth the time to experiment with it.
The BRAND of salt will generally not make a difference, but the KIND of salt can. A teaspoon of granulated salt will weigh differently to a teaspoon of kosher salt due to the difference of the salt flake size. Most recipes are tested with kosher salt. The primary difference in something like a choc chip biscuit will be the dairy, the eggs (depending on the eggs themselves) or the chocolate. The darkness of the brown sugar will affect how caramelly it tastes, as dark brown sugar has more molasses in it than a light brown sugar. Vanilla WILL make a difference depending on whether you are using imitation vanilla or a proper vanilla extract/vanilla beans.
Man, I was literally just wanting this style of test earlier this week. So glad to get cookies from Nate. I think there are still a ton of ways to test the cookie (brown sugar brands - Asian, C&H, organic, etc, or melted vs browned vs normal butter). But this style even if difficult would be super interesting in other recipes too. Or maybe a Vegan vs NonVegan. From the get go we might think the vegan one isn't better, but in the name of science you have to assume both outcomes are possible. I know you try to stick closely to the same recipe, so maybe vegan eggs give you the replacement amount, vegan butter might be tougher. I know chemically they are different but it would be a fun experiment.
This is a great idea. If you want to upscale this you could do this to another recipe. If you could afford then increase the person sample size then if you could determine which parameters will bring significant change in flavor using statistics.
What I do is make a double or quad batch and use a chilled metal mixing bowl and whip the batter to the point of being lighter colored and fluffy peaks before putting in chocolate chips. Then I keep it in the fridge between batches so that it stays firm and light. Also make sure to place batter in rough balls and time it so that it's just barely cooked through or a little before that point? This additional amount of air bubbles from the whipping of the mixmaster helps make the cookies lighter tasting and nicely chewy. It's like the difference between ice cream with or without air bubbles (aka creamy versus ice cube ) as long as you don't overcook. Waaaay too easy to snack on. Edit: Also, the recipe I use doesn't use butter but rather Crisco shortening. Not sure if that makes a difference or not with the whipping.
I couldn't tell from the video whether this would apply or not, but I know that the Great Value brand doesn't really have a dark brown sugar, but most of the more expensive brands do have both a light and dark brown sugar. If you used dark brown sugar for the brand name, that would make a difference because dark brown sugar has a richer flavor than light.
Since A-B testing is notoriously easy to bias (which goes first, etc), firms will often use AAB or ABB testing (duplicating one of the variables) to help cancel out reporting errors / weight your testers appropriately (the tester who recognizes that two of the items are identical should be weighted more and the one who finds differences in identical products should be weighted less). You're using your friends as a measurement tool... but you haven't "calibrated" your measurement yet! You may want to put them through a testing gauntlet to determine their relative tasting strength / accuracy.
This is actually a great idea for a video but youre prob the only one who is willing to make so many batches lol. Nate you should do a real recipe vs a recipe made from chatGPT.
Baking soda absolutely matters...it's just not "brand or basic" it's "is it fresh". I've used "high end" baking soda that was in a fancy bag that was a year old and it didn't matter how fancy it was, it didn't work.
Different brands of baking POWDER might make a difference because they can have different compositions of ingredients. I just stick to the same brand for predictability. Different types of salt crystals could also make a difference, but there's more to consider for that than just price.
So I am not suggesting more cookies unless you want to, but I will say that position in the oven with them being on either top or bottom rack does make a difference in the bake of the cookies and noticing how one of the testers had mentioned that several of the cookies tasted greasier than others makes me wonder of those were done on a different rack. Unfortunately without doing this in a lab its damn near impossible to test anything without the slightest inconsistency but I do think this was a very interesting test and agree that some of the results are surprising.
Just to throw my two cents in, the only difference I have noticed in my cookies (Full disclosure, I make a recipe off a jello pudding pack, so it does have vanilla pudding in it) is when I use eggs from the farm down the street. They just seem better than what I can buy from the store, expensive brand or generic.
I'm not surprised the chocolate chips made a difference. I used to buy chocolate chips just for snacking and there was a big difference in quality in name brand vs store brand or generic brand. The cheaper brands texture was not as good, not as melty or creamy.
alton brown did a cookie episode and he basically talked about the ingredients that changes the texture of cookies and whatnot. It's not exactly the same but this video reminded me of that episode
Not surprised the brown sugar made a difference. Thing is that even using the same brand at different freshness levels will have an impact on texture. Molasses is interesting stuff.
It really doesn’t surprise me as to what made a difference. Brown Sugar, there is a lot of factors that could make one brown sugar batter than another. First there is the size and consistency of the crystals. If they are to large and to hard it will give a grainy feel in your mouth. I personally think the age is a big factor as well, and how it’s stored. Brown sugar has molasses in it, and that gives it a more malty flavour. Most people I know buy yellow sugar and use that instead. Quite a few people think they are the same thing. But one has molasses and the other doesn’t. There is also brown sugar and the much darker old fashion brown sugar. Once again the differences is in the amount of molasses. Vanilla didn’t surprise me either. There are premium vanilla beans and not premium vanilla beans. Which used has a different taste. Then there is the quality of alcohol used. Vanilla is basically vanilla bean paste mixed with some sort of solvent and then it’s left to age for a while. Like with wine, how long, in what way can make a huge difference in the final product. The cheap vanilla is usually artificial vanilla. I think that speaks for itself. Chocolate chips will also make a huge difference. Not all chocolate is equal. That’s why I always use the best chocolate I can find, the same with coco. Everything else won’t make any discernible difference. Great video by the way. It’s a great idea and a question that everyone wonders about when choosing one or the other at the grocery store. Especially now with the prices of everything rising at alarming rates.
To do this correctly you'll need to make 512 batches with every possible combination of each of the 9 ingredients. Or you could shortcut and do 9 batches (each with one ingredient replaced), then choose the best of those and then make 8 more batches (with each of the remaining ingredients replaced), and so on, until you stop finding differences. My guess would be that the butter, vanilla, and chocolate chips would be the big differentiators, that flour and eggs might make a slight difference, and that everything else is completely irrelevant.
My girlfriend and I were pleasantly surprised to find that the cheap v name brand stuff didn't make much of a difference, we usually use the cheapest stuff we can get and we feel a lot better about that now lol
From the title and thumbnail I thought he was just going to take out one ingredient in each batch. Like one without flour, one without eggs, one without butter, etc.
The recipe on the back of the Nestle bag is the *original* chocolate chip recipe from Massachusetts: they bought the recipe from the woman who created it, and they've printed it on the packages ever since.
I know brown sugar can be made industrially with sulphuric acid (and normal sugar). I've heard the refining steps are difficult/expensive, so I'd assume fancy brown sugar would make sense to be better.
But you didn't make the ultimate cookie at the end!!!! You need to then do one more batch with all the "best" ingredients swapped in for the final test! lol Otherwise, totally loved this! Can't wait to see more, I hope!
I had always thought that brown sugar made a big difference. But I would like to see a video where you compared time in the fridge before baking ranging from 15 minutes to 2 hours in increments of 30 minutes.
I figured the chocolate vanilla and flour would make the biggest difference. Vanilla extract and vanilla essence taste vastly different to me. Also cheaper chocolate usually is less finely milled and has different ratios of the expensive vs cheaper ingredients of the chocolate so when eating it I notice that difference. And lastly especially in bread and cake I have noticed the difference of the type of flour used, and with that I mean the same “name” but different brand and prices. Again I think here the milling and sifting and processing of the flour makes a difference. Not sure if this is just willy nilly or if it makes sense.
Before I watch the taste test what I think will happen is: Brown sugar will make it slightly better. Salt will not matter. Baking powder will not matter. Flour May matter. Chocolate will make it a tad better. Butter probably will not affect it, though, it might. Vanilla most certainly will. Eggs not at all. Plain sugar I doubt it will matter. Actually, it may.
I seriously thought (by the title) that Nate would be baking 8 batches of cookies, each one missing one of those ingredients entirely (except for the chocolate chips themselves). Is the saltless batch better or worse than the batch missing butter, or flour, or eggs? Probably, but it would be fun to rank them all from best to worst. In case you've not grasped it yet, Nate, this is another idea for the future.
You shouldn't be so surprised about the brown sugar. The cheap ones are made with ultra cheap corn syrup, whereas the high quality brands are made with real sugar cane molasses, and that makes quite a difference in both taste and texture. - some countries uses sugar beets molasses, but it do not taste the same, and do not have the same texture. It's still better than corn syrup, but inferior to sugar cane molasses. But in my own experience, the chocolate in any form of chocolate cake or cookies make the biggest difference. Do not cheap out on the quality of the chocolate, use high end chocolate and then you can skip a bit on the rest of the ingredients, and still get a very tasty product. 😋
The brown sugar surprised me as well, I have to guess that maybe it is the amount of molasses in it that makes the difference. For the butter I would guess that if both were typical American butters, that might not matter because they might be close enough with the butterfat content, but like European butter tends to have more butterfat than American butter, I would expect that to potentially create a difference, then again in chocolate chip cookies that might not be enough to tell, might need something more like a shortbread to tell the difference in the butter. For the flour, kinda the same thing, there might be differences that would be quite noticable given different flours if you have bleached vs unbleached, or different protein content. For the most part it would seem to me and this test shows it, that the chocolate chips would likely make the most difference.
Considering brown sugar and chocolate chips are the two most distinguishing ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie as compared to other flavors, I'm not surprised they're on the list. And I'd assume the flour was noticeable because it absorbed more or less liquid and made the results more or less greasy? If so, I'd actually prefer the cheap one, since I like greasy cookies 😅 I am, though, also surprised the butter and eggs didn't seem to matter!
I don't remember what I commented on the last video, but going into this one, I kinda figured the flour, butter, eggs, and chocolate would make the biggest difference, so I wasn't too far off.
I think you've done as well as can be expected. There is a LOT that can vary in cooking, and trying to get everything sorted is near impossible. Are many factors you're not reasonable able to account for. Say in theory a great cookie needs a certain amount of moisture, and some of that comes from the butter. On a humid day, there's enough moisture in the air that the cheap butter provides enough moisture, but on a dry day the cheap butter isn't enough, and so under that circumstance, the expensive butter makes a difference. That sort of conditional circumstance would take years of testing to sort out, and unless you want to do Brand vs Basic full time, just not possible. And none of that accounts for differences in personal taste.
I'd do a third version that's basically the opposite of this. Do everything brand, and switch in the basic for one thing at a time, and see if you get similar results.
Great experiment- I suspected flour and using brown sugar would make a bigger difference.... though I am wondering if using different type (cake, bread, all purposes, etc) of flour would make a bigger deal?
I want to see Nate make three more batches: one again with just basic ingredients, one with all brand ingredients, and a final one with only the four most notably different ingredients from this video.
Yes
100%
Absolutely.
yes please
AGREED
I appreciate the fact that you weighted some of the ingredients and tried to explain. I switched to weighing a lot of my ingredients for baking a few years back and have noticed a difference. Especially with my bread making. Weighing really is better than using measuring cups.
I personally find weighing easier and quicker too. No need to faff around trying to level your ingredients in measuring cups and spoons lol. Plus, it's the only way to really get that consistency every time.
Here in Denmark we always use weight contra volume, and of the exact same reason. Using weight make a much better and homogene product.
America is really the only place where people bake without weighing ingredients. It’s honestly a bit of a weird practice, especially if you are trying for consistency. With modern scales, weighing isn’t a hassle at all.
This is a great follow up! Isolating each ingredient is definitely the best way to determine what makes the difference for better cookies but I agree with what others have said: 3 more batches should be a final comparison between brand, basic, and selective brand cookies!
i think to further test this you should make the expensive batch, but replace each ingredient with the cheaper one. see if missing the ingredient makes the cookie worse, rather than seeing if adding it makes it better. maybe good for part three
That is a fun idea!
You are one of the tasters and just want more cookies, aren't you?
@@DH-xw6jp I'm not one of the tasters, but after watching this video, I volunteer as tribute to try 11 batches of cookies 😂
I love this series of videos. Very similar to Barry Lewis’ cheap vs steep. I really enjoy the difference in approach from the two, the scientific approach of trying to define the actual better ingredients was interesting.
Loving all the content you’re creating. So glad you didn’t disappear after leaving TKOR. The internet is a better place with you in it 😁
As a meal prep and coffee enthusiast. I strongly support and encourage weighing your food instead of using a volumetric measurement. Thank you for not bowing to the crowd. Weight doesn’t change volumetric measurements do.
Even the same "quantity" is going to be controversial or at least complex for certain ingredients. Higher protein flours require more hydration to achieve the correct result, cheap butter has more water and less fat which ought to be accounted for in the recipe somewhere, salt crystal shape impacts volume measurement greatly but often too little to weigh accurately on a home scale.
in a regular oven, its generally best to bake your cookies on the top shelf. So having two batches, on two different levels at the same time will yield two different texture results. best to do one batch at a time, at the same height in the oven. unless youre using a very high quality convection oven. the recipe breakdown is super solid! lots of fun! thanks man!
This was soooo interesting! Would be great to see more of these types of videos! Testing which ingredients matter most
This guy comes up with such good ideas. I hope he does more videos like these.
While chocolate chips can vary drastically in quality, I think the ingredient people don't expect to make a difference is the brown sugar. I have cooked for enough decades now to know that what is often sold as brown sugar now is not what it was when those recipes were written. Light brown sugar used to be darker and more moist. So, for a better outcome use what is labeled as dark brown sugar. It makes a difference.
I loved this Nate, the big one for me was butter, I've been thinking about changing buttter in a Christmas cookie recipe that I have made for years. Very interesting no one picked that out! Thank you:)
His friends are so supportive, it's wholesome 🥰 they're always down to taste his food experiments
Edit: cholatate chips
I love the red headed friend. I laughed at his body language. He kept yawning and I thought he might lay down and have a nap at anytime. Lol
I mean, if I were invited over to eat an unlimited quantity of cookies, I wouldn't say no either.
If your friend offered free food its hard to say no tbh
I figured, butter, the chips and brown sugar. We have seen a vast improvement in our cookies when we started to make homemade brown sugar. The cookie dough almost has a mousse like consistency, even after sitting in the fridge overnight.
This is like Guga going after the “perfect” steak. This is gonna be an awesome rabbit hole.
I love that Nate's channel had just become about baking but I get so curious about this kind of stuff so I'm so glad he's doing these
Hey Nate you could do a TH-cam short showing a cup of flour compacted and then a cup of flour just fluffy and the weights between the two.
showing that measuring a cup of flour by weight is a better form of measurement than by size.
Big part of the Vanilla is that the Vanilla plant is actually a bit expensive, so Vanilla Extract is gonna be the expensive option, but the imitation/artificial vanilla is gonna be a lot cheaper. While chemically it's the same, how both are processed, environment they're in can make very subtle changes in the flavor.
I am surprised by how much I am loving this “series”!
Better brown sugar has more molasses.. and you know the better chocolate chips have better chocolate.
I love watching your BvB episodes. Me wife and I always try and predict what's the most important ingredient before you start your own taste testing. It's fun.
Loving how the channel is growing and shaping nate
I figured brown sugar would make a difference. My wife bakes and she has 4 or 5 types of brown sugar in the pantry that all taste different.
The salt matters based on grain size; I have separate cooking salt and cookie salt, 'cause coarse-grain cookie salt won't completely dissolve, so it leaves tiny tastable grains in the finished cookies.
THIS is the kind of content I'm here for!
More of these hardcore comps, Nate.
You got this from Angel, yo. I can tell lol
I like the way you stick pretty close to scientific method. I want to do that sometime, but don’t have the time and patience unless it’s directly related to what I’m doing.
Definitely do more follow up episodes like this one.
Love these videos. Also makes me happy to hear an American using grams as a measurement
I weigh baking ingredients wherever practical, but the world can pry Fahrenheit out of my cold, dead hands!
@@charlie6923 hahah
i can see the work and care that went into this video, appreciate your....scientific work
Has nothing to do with cost. Growing up making cookies with grandma, a finer grain sugar, a bread flour vs cake flour vs all purpose, and dark vs light brown sugar, effect the outcome.
Alright now do a test with a control batch, a batch with all the control ingredients but with the flour, brown sugar, butter, vanilla and chocolate swapped for the better ingredients, and an expensive batch.
I was so with you on the butter! Very interesting that it's brown sugar. I would also be curious to see browned butter vs. straight from the package, but that's kind of a different experiment. I learned I'll keep buying the store brand for most stuff, but I'll be upgrading my brown sugar next time!
Cookiemonster approves this science
Make three batches: basic, brand, and basic with the brand ingredients that were noticable.
Noticed a difference on the flours... largely because I switched from bleached to unbleached a while ago and found it improved baking noticably, even when buying the store brand unbleached flour. I even prefer generic unbleached to name brand bleached flour.
Not at all surprised by the sugar, either, I've been playing around with different sugars and sugar blends for a while (keep turbinado and caster sugar around standard, now, if there's a call for dark brown I can always add in a smidgen of molasses or such).
I love this more than the brand vs basic videos - super interesting!
You should always weigh ingredients when baking. You're exactly right.
Yes, that should be a no brainer. Is it not obvious to everyone that mass is the more accurate and repeatable measurement?
I think your biggest accomplishment is getting your friends together in one place. With my friends, that's a herculean task.
Great series! I love brand versus basic. That said you are a brave scientist who is also a glutton for punishment. Eleven batches of cookies seems crazy but your pain is our gain. So thank you very much.
I'm not surprised about the chocolate chips, vanilla, and brown sugar. Brown sugar has molasses in it, making it more moist (chewier cookie), real vanilla vs. artificial vanilla makes a difference in flavour, and chocolate chips can make or break the recipe (the higher the cocoa, the more rich the flavour, BUT milk chocolate has more sugar in it so it makes the recipe sweeter). I would love to see this test done using lard substituted for butter and using different types of chocolate chips (Nestlé Toll House, Hershey's, Great Value, etc...) and milk chocolate vs. dark chocolate vs. white chips (or flavoured ones just for a challenge).
My guess were that brown sugar and butter would make a difference. Vanilla extract I was a bit curious about, but didn't think it would really matter. Flour, eggs, sugar, salt, baking soda and the rest I didn't think would make much of a difference. Well I got one right... ish...
Brown sugar really varies in taste. It can be a deep musty taste or a light "springy" (?) taste or anything between. It wouldn't surprise me if you could find both cheap and expensive versions of both.
Butter can also vary a lot, but I'm not sure how much that carries over in taste after it has been cooked. This time it doesn't seem like it made any noticeable difference. Per haps making a taste test of butter would be interesting. Make sandwiches using a few different brands of butter, fry pieces of bread in the same brands, perhaps bake cookies as a last test and see what differences your friends can taste if any. It would be a very narrow test, not necessarily one that could determine what butter is the best, but it could tell you just how important the brand is for the taste of a dish, and if it's worth the time to experiment with it.
I would love to see making him three identical batches of cookies and see whether they guess whats different or not.
Fun video. Now I want cookies. :D
Other than doing all brand-name but swapping out one cheap ingredient to see if it degrades the taste for completeness, I think you nailed it
Technic makes a difference, butter temperature, mixing speed, temperature when cooking/time in the oven, etc
Everytime I hear "better butter" I always think of that old butter commercial, if you know you know lol
If you take the baking soda, halve it, and then add an equal amount of baking powder, they turn out really good
The BRAND of salt will generally not make a difference, but the KIND of salt can. A teaspoon of granulated salt will weigh differently to a teaspoon of kosher salt due to the difference of the salt flake size. Most recipes are tested with kosher salt. The primary difference in something like a choc chip biscuit will be the dairy, the eggs (depending on the eggs themselves) or the chocolate. The darkness of the brown sugar will affect how caramelly it tastes, as dark brown sugar has more molasses in it than a light brown sugar. Vanilla WILL make a difference depending on whether you are using imitation vanilla or a proper vanilla extract/vanilla beans.
Man, I was literally just wanting this style of test earlier this week. So glad to get cookies from Nate. I think there are still a ton of ways to test the cookie (brown sugar brands - Asian, C&H, organic, etc, or melted vs browned vs normal butter). But this style even if difficult would be super interesting in other recipes too.
Or maybe a Vegan vs NonVegan. From the get go we might think the vegan one isn't better, but in the name of science you have to assume both outcomes are possible. I know you try to stick closely to the same recipe, so maybe vegan eggs give you the replacement amount, vegan butter might be tougher. I know chemically they are different but it would be a fun experiment.
I love this series. No disrespect to TKOR, but I watch more of these vids than theirs nowadays 😂
This is a great idea. If you want to upscale this you could do this to another recipe. If you could afford then increase the person sample size then if you could determine which parameters will bring significant change in flavor using statistics.
13:00 yeah we call these cookies too. Biscuits are harder and usually smaller :)
What I do is make a double or quad batch and use a chilled metal mixing bowl and whip the batter to the point of being lighter colored and fluffy peaks before putting in chocolate chips. Then I keep it in the fridge between batches so that it stays firm and light. Also make sure to place batter in rough balls and time it so that it's just barely cooked through or a little before that point?
This additional amount of air bubbles from the whipping of the mixmaster helps make the cookies lighter tasting and nicely chewy. It's like the difference between ice cream with or without air bubbles (aka creamy versus ice cube ) as long as you don't overcook. Waaaay too easy to snack on.
Edit: Also, the recipe I use doesn't use butter but rather Crisco shortening. Not sure if that makes a difference or not with the whipping.
You nailed it. You never need to make another cookie video.
I couldn't tell from the video whether this would apply or not, but I know that the Great Value brand doesn't really have a dark brown sugar, but most of the more expensive brands do have both a light and dark brown sugar. If you used dark brown sugar for the brand name, that would make a difference because dark brown sugar has a richer flavor than light.
Since A-B testing is notoriously easy to bias (which goes first, etc), firms will often use AAB or ABB testing (duplicating one of the variables) to help cancel out reporting errors / weight your testers appropriately (the tester who recognizes that two of the items are identical should be weighted more and the one who finds differences in identical products should be weighted less). You're using your friends as a measurement tool... but you haven't "calibrated" your measurement yet! You may want to put them through a testing gauntlet to determine their relative tasting strength / accuracy.
Also, I loved that the typo on Chocolate Chips was consistent throughout the video 😂
This is actually a great idea for a video but youre prob the only one who is willing to make so many batches lol. Nate you should do a real recipe vs a recipe made from chatGPT.
Baking soda absolutely matters...it's just not "brand or basic" it's "is it fresh". I've used "high end" baking soda that was in a fancy bag that was a year old and it didn't matter how fancy it was, it didn't work.
Different brands of baking POWDER might make a difference because they can have different compositions of ingredients. I just stick to the same brand for predictability. Different types of salt crystals could also make a difference, but there's more to consider for that than just price.
Lol @Nate, at the end of the video you like like your a) hungover b) had a long gaming session the night before c) just woke up.
Not really a “ brand vs basic “ but baking powder over baking soda and sub out about an 1/8 of semisweet for dark chunks.
So I am not suggesting more cookies unless you want to, but I will say that position in the oven with them being on either top or bottom rack does make a difference in the bake of the cookies and noticing how one of the testers had mentioned that several of the cookies tasted greasier than others makes me wonder of those were done on a different rack. Unfortunately without doing this in a lab its damn near impossible to test anything without the slightest inconsistency but I do think this was a very interesting test and agree that some of the results are surprising.
Going by weight is the more accurate method of measuring.
Just to throw my two cents in, the only difference I have noticed in my cookies (Full disclosure, I make a recipe off a jello pudding pack, so it does have vanilla pudding in it) is when I use eggs from the farm down the street. They just seem better than what I can buy from the store, expensive brand or generic.
I'm not surprised the chocolate chips made a difference. I used to buy chocolate chips just for snacking and there was a big difference in quality in name brand vs store brand or generic brand. The cheaper brands texture was not as good, not as melty or creamy.
alton brown did a cookie episode and he basically talked about the ingredients that changes the texture of cookies and whatnot. It's not exactly the same but this video reminded me of that episode
Not surprised the brown sugar made a difference.
Thing is that even using the same brand at different freshness levels will have an impact on texture. Molasses is interesting stuff.
It really doesn’t surprise me as to what made a difference. Brown Sugar, there is a lot of factors that could make one brown sugar batter than another.
First there is the size and consistency of the crystals. If they are to large and to hard it will give a grainy feel in your mouth. I personally think the age is a big factor as well, and how it’s stored.
Brown sugar has molasses in it, and that gives it a more malty flavour. Most people I know buy yellow sugar and use that instead. Quite a few people think they are the same thing. But one has molasses and the other doesn’t.
There is also brown sugar and the much darker old fashion brown sugar. Once again the differences is in the amount of molasses.
Vanilla didn’t surprise me either. There are premium vanilla beans and not premium vanilla beans. Which used has a different taste. Then there is the quality of alcohol used.
Vanilla is basically vanilla bean paste mixed with some sort of solvent and then it’s left to age for a while. Like with wine, how long, in what way can make a huge difference in the final product.
The cheap vanilla is usually artificial vanilla. I think that speaks for itself.
Chocolate chips will also make a huge difference. Not all chocolate is equal. That’s why I always use the best chocolate I can find, the same with coco.
Everything else won’t make any discernible difference.
Great video by the way. It’s a great idea and a question that everyone wonders about when choosing one or the other at the grocery store. Especially now with the prices of everything rising at alarming rates.
What's funny is we wouldn't say that in England, we call chocolate chip cookies cookies too. Biscuits are basically everything else
Man, you are really going all in on this concept
Cookie bonanza! 🥰🥰 Thank so so much for this.❤️
To do this correctly you'll need to make 512 batches with every possible combination of each of the 9 ingredients.
Or you could shortcut and do 9 batches (each with one ingredient replaced), then choose the best of those and then make 8 more batches (with each of the remaining ingredients replaced), and so on, until you stop finding differences.
My guess would be that the butter, vanilla, and chocolate chips would be the big differentiators, that flour and eggs might make a slight difference, and that everything else is completely irrelevant.
My girlfriend and I were pleasantly surprised to find that the cheap v name brand stuff didn't make much of a difference, we usually use the cheapest stuff we can get and we feel a lot better about that now lol
From the title and thumbnail I thought he was just going to take out one ingredient in each batch. Like one without flour, one without eggs, one without butter, etc.
The recipe on the back of the Nestle bag is the *original* chocolate chip recipe from Massachusetts: they bought the recipe from the woman who created it, and they've printed it on the packages ever since.
I know brown sugar can be made industrially with sulphuric acid (and normal sugar). I've heard the refining steps are difficult/expensive, so I'd assume fancy brown sugar would make sense to be better.
But you didn't make the ultimate cookie at the end!!!! You need to then do one more batch with all the "best" ingredients swapped in for the final test! lol Otherwise, totally loved this! Can't wait to see more, I hope!
Uh-Oh. Position (top, mid, bottom) in the oven definitely makes a difference!!
I had always thought that brown sugar made a big difference. But I would like to see a video where you compared time in the fridge before baking ranging from 15 minutes to 2 hours in increments of 30 minutes.
I figured the chocolate vanilla and flour would make the biggest difference. Vanilla extract and vanilla essence taste vastly different to me. Also cheaper chocolate usually is less finely milled and has different ratios of the expensive vs cheaper ingredients of the chocolate so when eating it I notice that difference. And lastly especially in bread and cake I have noticed the difference of the type of flour used, and with that I mean the same “name” but different brand and prices. Again I think here the milling and sifting and processing of the flour makes a difference. Not sure if this is just willy nilly or if it makes sense.
You should collab with Adam Regusea for more food science videos.
4:52 : A wild Tim the Tatman appeared! (In spirit)
How to get invited to every party, ever: bring 11 batches of cookies.
Before I watch the taste test what I think will happen is:
Brown sugar will make it slightly better.
Salt will not matter.
Baking powder will not matter.
Flour May matter.
Chocolate will make it a tad better.
Butter probably will not affect it, though, it might.
Vanilla most certainly will.
Eggs not at all.
Plain sugar I doubt it will matter. Actually, it may.
I seriously thought (by the title) that Nate would be baking 8 batches of cookies, each one missing one of those ingredients entirely (except for the chocolate chips themselves). Is the saltless batch better or worse than the batch missing butter, or flour, or eggs? Probably, but it would be fun to rank them all from best to worst. In case you've not grasped it yet, Nate, this is another idea for the future.
You shouldn't be so surprised about the brown sugar. The cheap ones are made with ultra cheap corn syrup, whereas the high quality brands are made with real sugar cane molasses, and that makes quite a difference in both taste and texture.
- some countries uses sugar beets molasses, but it do not taste the same, and do not have the same texture. It's still better than corn syrup, but inferior to sugar cane molasses.
But in my own experience, the chocolate in any form of chocolate cake or cookies make the biggest difference. Do not cheap out on the quality of the chocolate, use high end chocolate and then you can skip a bit on the rest of the ingredients, and still get a very tasty product. 😋
The brown sugar surprised me as well, I have to guess that maybe it is the amount of molasses in it that makes the difference. For the butter I would guess that if both were typical American butters, that might not matter because they might be close enough with the butterfat content, but like European butter tends to have more butterfat than American butter, I would expect that to potentially create a difference, then again in chocolate chip cookies that might not be enough to tell, might need something more like a shortbread to tell the difference in the butter. For the flour, kinda the same thing, there might be differences that would be quite noticable given different flours if you have bleached vs unbleached, or different protein content. For the most part it would seem to me and this test shows it, that the chocolate chips would likely make the most difference.
I think for butter, browning it would give you the most bang for your buck
You're insane nate🤣🤣
Considering brown sugar and chocolate chips are the two most distinguishing ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie as compared to other flavors, I'm not surprised they're on the list. And I'd assume the flour was noticeable because it absorbed more or less liquid and made the results more or less greasy? If so, I'd actually prefer the cheap one, since I like greasy cookies 😅 I am, though, also surprised the butter and eggs didn't seem to matter!
A poster outside the window would go a long ways.
I don't remember what I commented on the last video, but going into this one, I kinda figured the flour, butter, eggs, and chocolate would make the biggest difference, so I wasn't too far off.
Only 11 batches... If you're not testing every possible combination of ingredients then you don't know what's good or bad :D
The thumbnail made me think he was gonna make the recipe but omit one ingredient entirely from each batch.
I would beg to differ on the salt thing especially if iodized. But I also typically add extra salt
I think you've done as well as can be expected. There is a LOT that can vary in cooking, and trying to get everything sorted is near impossible. Are many factors you're not reasonable able to account for. Say in theory a great cookie needs a certain amount of moisture, and some of that comes from the butter. On a humid day, there's enough moisture in the air that the cheap butter provides enough moisture, but on a dry day the cheap butter isn't enough, and so under that circumstance, the expensive butter makes a difference.
That sort of conditional circumstance would take years of testing to sort out, and unless you want to do Brand vs Basic full time, just not possible.
And none of that accounts for differences in personal taste.
I'd do a third version that's basically the opposite of this. Do everything brand, and switch in the basic for one thing at a time, and see if you get similar results.
Great experiment- I suspected flour and using brown sugar would make a bigger difference.... though I am wondering if using different type (cake, bread, all purposes, etc) of flour would make a bigger deal?