When I was a kid I didn’t know what caviar was and I thought truffles were alcoholic chocolates adults ate to get drunk. I thought the fanciest, most expensive food on Earth was Viennetta ice-cream cake and the boxed chocolate-chip biscuits that look more chocolate than biscuit (I assume they were Arnott’s Premier).
I remember the excitement and guilt of finding an open but untouched box of the biscuits in my home cupboard, eating every single one of them, and then spending the afternoon wondering how much money I’d just cost my parents, whether I’d ever be hungry again and whether the biscuits or the entire pack of Cheese In a Biscuit I’d scoffed a few weeks earlier was the best meal of my young life.
While I wasn’t expecting a taste test of 13 supermarket choc-chip biscuits to match the joy I felt that day, I thought it might at least hint at it. I did the taste test with four friends. We tried the biscuits blind and scored for appearance (a small percentage of the final score), texture and taste.
You can divide all the biscuits we tasted into three categories: 1. larger, crunchy-crumbly 40% chocolate biscuits; 2. smaller, cheaper and softer 20% chocolate biscuits; 3. outliers. The 40% chocolate varieties from Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Arnott’s Premier were all so remarkably similar, if I ate them on different days I’m not sure I’d be able to pick which is which. I excluded biscuits from the bakery section of the supermarket as they compete more with biscuits from bakeries (generally soft and designed to be eaten instantly) and less with the shelf-stable aisle packets (generally crunchy and designed to last in pantries). But we did try a few Coles and Woolworths bakery biscuits at the end of the test for a general comparison. Though the bakery-section biscuits were inconsistent (depending on the day they were baked) they were generally better, even when accounting for price.
In total, I ate about 15 biscuits – a similar quantity to my childhood self – but instead of wondering whether the biscuit feast counted among the best meals of my life, I just felt regret. I expected a premiere experience, but got bludgeoned with mediocrity. The other reviewers felt the same way: the top score of the day was only 7/10. As soon as we finished, the reviewer who had expressed the most enthusiasm over the taste test said he would never eat a chocolate-chip biscuit again. He then, without another word, took off his shirt, walked to bed and fell asleep.
Several hours later, the reviewer woke up and almost immediately ate another biscuit. I remember thinking: sometimes mediocrity can suffice.
Best overall
Pat and Stick’s Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies, 250g, $6.99 ($2.79 per 100g), available at Harris Farm and select grocers
Score: 7/10
I’m a reckless and imprecise cook who often spends far too much money on fancy ingredients. It’s a great recipe for salad but it makes for some odd baking results. These biscuits taste as though I could have made them: like the core ingredients of a biscuit – butter, wheat and sugar – but arranged in an odd way. They’re mostly crunchy but sometimes crumbly, and instead of having evenly distributed chocolate speckles like every other biscuit, the chocolate was inconsistently splayed out in layers, like an architectural dig in a land that’s witnessed several civilisations. That may sound like a limp endorsement, but next to biscuits that taste as though they’ve been manufactured for public-sector office meetings, tasting homemade is as gourmet as you can get.
Best value
Belmont Biscuit Co, Dark Signature Cookies 40% Chocolate Chip, 400g, $4.49 ($1.12 per 100g), available at Aldi
Score: 6.5/10
Of all the biscuits in category 1, these were both the highest scoring and the cheapest per weight (although rivals might be cheaper on special). But the difference was in decimal points. I’d say they have a touch more va-va-voom from being higher in both sugar and sodium, but they do have a weird aftertaste. “Good enough for an afternoon treat if you’re trapped in an office,” wrote a reviewer who’s never worked in an office.
The rest
Olina’s Bakehouse Artisan Cookies Chocolate Chip, 150g, $5 ($3.33 per 100g), available at Woolworths
Score: 6/10
After chomping through a field of biscuits that crumbled at the first hint of tooth pressure, this felt as though it was designed for a jaw-only gym routine. “I could injure my teeth on this biccy [but] I would not be mad about it,” wrote one reviewer. “Tough as a gingernut,” wrote another. Unlike Ginger Nuts, which I love, these weren’t dry. They were also the most sugar-loaded biscuit of the day. It’s a bit much, but thanks to brown sugar and butter, the sweetness at least has a fun, toffee-caramel taste. A hard, overly sweet biscuit has a place and, as many reviewers wrote, that place is dunked in a cup of tea.
Arnott’s Australia’s Premier Chocolate Chip Cookies, 310g, $4 ($1.29 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 6/10
Arnott’s Premiere is not the biscuit I remember. The biscuit of my memories is at least an eight out of 10. This is a photocopy of a photocopy, lucky that the original was made long enough ago that no one remembers what it looked like. I doubt the original was made from vegetable oil, wheat, baking powder, emulsifiers and chocolate that tastes this cheap. Like a washed-up rock star, it couldn’t even muster the self-respect to outperform its tribute acts with Woolworths and Belmont’s 40% chocolate brands scoring higher, while having cheaper per-weight prices (although it did narrowly beat Coles’ version). As one reviewer wrote, “underwhelming … like all the others”.
Byron Bay Cookies’ Milk Choc Chunk Cookie Bites, 100g, $4 ($4 per 100), available from major supermarkets
Score: 5/10
If Olina’s is the biscuit for gym bro jaws, Byron Bay is the biscuit for nursing home jaws. It’s soft, crumbly and baked platinum blond – more what I’d expect from a stick of shortbread. The texture, undercooked appeal, nipple shape, minimal chocolate flavour and saltiness made this the most divisive biscuit of the day. Those who liked it described it like cookie dough; those who didn’t wrote it was the kind of biscuit you’d get served free with coffee at a cafe 10 years ago. A welcome surprise but never something I’d buy.
Cadbury Cookies’ Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies, 156g, $4 ($2.56 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 4/10
Not only did this biscuit have the lowest chocolate percentage of the day, the chocolate it did have was roundly slammed for being “low-rent” and “flavourless”. Is it ironic or sad it came from the only chocolate company represented in this taste test? “Yuck,” wrote one reviewer, “it looks like a child’s idea of a cookie, the taste is sickly.” “Kid’s biscuit. Chocolate is extremely low rent,” wrote another. The only thing that saved it from an abysmal score was the texture. It was one of the only biscuits to have that out-of-the-oven chewy outside, soft centre going on.
Belmont Biscuit Co, 20% Choc Chip Cookies, 500g, $2.99 ($0.58 per 100g), available at Aldi
Score: 3/10
Coles, Woolworths and Aldi all have a 20% chocolate (category 2) biscuit. While the big two supermarkets scored marginally better than Aldi’s dead-last offering, all three should be considered the culinary equivalent of those paper streamers people buy for kids’ birthdays: products whose entire worth is in their cheapness. Even the slightest increase in price would alert the universe to the joylessness, making them completely irrelevant. The reviewers wrote: “Tastes like industrial nothingness, smells like play-dough”; “Very little chocolate, which is a bad error because the biscuit is shit” and “The whole thing depresses me”. The last comment didn’t specify whether they were referring to Belmont biscuits or the taste test generally.
