The best chocolate for cookies

Chocolate chips are formulated with reduced cocoa butter specifically so they keep their shape through baking. Chopped bar and most chunks are ordinary chocolate and melt into pools and streaks.

That is the whole choice. Gooey cookies with molten seams want chopped bar; cookies with visible discrete pieces want chips. Neither is better and the packaging rarely explains the difference.

The reduced cocoa butter that makes chips hold shape also makes them taste flatter, and chip formulations are generally built for cost. A 60–70% bar chopped roughly gives better flavour and a mix of piece sizes — dust that melts into the dough, shards that streak, and larger pieces that stay.

That size variation is why bakery cookies look the way they do, and it costs nothing to replicate.

Cookie doughs are sweet, so a higher-percentage chocolate balances better than it would elsewhere. Around 60–70% is the practical range; below 50% the cookie reads as uniformly sweet.

Above 80% the chocolate becomes brittle and slightly chalky in a baked cookie, and the reduced sugar changes the dough's behaviour if you are using a large quantity.

Chill the dough. Cold dough spreads less, and chocolate distributed through a cold dough stays where it was put. Press a few extra pieces onto the surface before baking if you want the bakery look.

And salt: a few flakes on top before baking does more for a chocolate cookie than upgrading the chocolate does, because salt suppresses bitterness and lifts sweetness at the same time.