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Sign me up for Ghirardelli's bittersweet. I've also used Guittard with great results. Nestle's Toll House are not wretched, considering they're milk "chocolate." They have a pleasant aroma, texture and taste - but I wouldn't use any other milk chips. I haven't found any that taste like chocolate.

What about those huge "chocolate chunks" sold? If they tasted better, I'd use them instead of cutting chunks when I need chunks.

As for white chocolate - bleah. It tastes and feels like pure sweet fat in the mouth and bears no resemblance to chocolate.

This post inspired me to pick up a bag of Ghiradelli 60% semi-sweets. Now it's a toss up... choco chip cookies or chocolate chip buttermilk pancakes :-)

Last weekend I made cookies using a package of See's baking chips I'd been hoarding for a few years (yes a few years.) They look just like the picture, and I was happy with them. With that said, obviously it is not easy to get See's where I live, and they aren't exactly cost effective.

I used Valrhona before to good result, but between See's and Valrhona making chocolate chip cookies become prohibitively expensive. I also can't help but wonder if some of the high quality chocolate taste doesn't get lost in the baking. I would gladly spend extra for noticeable taste difference and just bake cookies less - husband likely does not agree with this sentiment, but I'm not convinced there is a taste difference. I've never eaten expensive versus affordable chips one right after the other.

I cannot wait to try Guittard or Ghiradelli, because they are at least 1/4 the cost of the Sharffenberger, Valrhona or See's. Maybe I should do a blind taste test with friends.

wait, this doesn't make any sense:

"the morsels are bigger than any others I've found... which means you can use less in a batch. I like to chop them up just a bit so they distribute more evenly in the dough."

They're bigger... so you chop them up... which means then they're the same size? I'm all for doing things because you want to and not because they make sense, so I think you should say that's what this is :)

Y'all are not right for flashing this cookie porn across my screen this early in the morning. This cookie looks like pure heaven. I agree with all of the suggestions (Guittard, Ghirardelli, etc), but (and not that this is the specific topic at hand) what I've found is that the cookies that treated me the best had a mix of a 60% or semi sweet chocolate chip mixed in with a milk chocolate chip. Now THAT is heaven!

my two cents: Guittard Semi-Sweet is the best chip...

I want a chocolate chip cookie sooo badly right now.

What about those Jacques Torres chocolate disks everyone raves about that are used in the New York Times chocolate chip cookie recipe?

I prefer milk chocolate Hershey's bars, broken into chunks. You get the expected chocolate flavor, but also great caramelized milk and coffee flavors.

Personally, I find that using a candy milk chocolate conveys a greater depth and personality to the cookie. Dark chocolate cookies can often be very one-dimensional, cloying and uninteresting, despite using very expensive ingredients.

My very favorite chocolate chip recipe is by Dorie Greenspan and calls not for chips but for chunks cut from a block of high-quality chocolate -- I use Caillebaut semisweet chocolate. Of course, I never turn up my nose at classic Toll House cookies made from Toll House chocolate chips by the recipe on the back of the bag.

@James Boo
Absolutely, Scharffen-berger milk chocolate is super smooth and seems to have a great chocolate flavor and have a smooth texture well after the cookies have cooled. In fact they're great in chilled cookies as I often have em stashed in my lunch which resides often in the office fridge.

The chocolate chip cookie is the yardstick of the dessert industry. So simple, yet so easy to do wrong. Great article!

Yeah I completely disagree with using chips, pastilles/wafers/disks are the way to go.