This may cause strife, even within my own marriage, but I have to speak my truth: there is no better chocolate chip cookie than the Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie. Nay, there is no better cookie than the Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie.

Right up front, you must know that this comes from the heart. I’m not in the pocket of big cookie and have no relationship with the Nestle company. I just have a life-long relationship with chocolate chip cookies. They might be the very first thing I learned to make in the kitchen. They were always my favorite, and I always liked to “help” mom make them, which involved eating a lot of cookie dough at various stages of cookie dough-ness. Eventually I realized I could just do it myself, the instructions were right there on the package. I could have cookies whenever I wanted. One time I recall making cookie dough just because I wanted to eat the dough and my sister snitching on me, like I was doing something wrong. But love can’t be wrong, she should have known this. I eventually got a chemistry degree and a daresay step one of that was discovering that I was good at following instructions for mixing things and then heating them up.

I realize that people have incentives to say that cookie recipes other than the Nestle Tollhouse one are better. And I am not knocking other types of cookies! I, too, will enjoy an M&M cookie, or a double chocolate chunk cookie, or a white chip macadamia nut cookie. There is room in this world for all types, except maybe oatmeal raisin, look I know I am not breaking new ground here on the cookie opinion front. But what really gets my goat are the fancy-pants recipe writers, who think their take on the chocolate chip cookie could ever be better than the original, the sublime, the Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie.

I’m talking about the people who think you need flaky sea salt as a topping. Who create absurd shortbread versions, who think it means something to add browned butter to the recipe. Those recipe writers who think their version could possibly be more “gourmet,” or somehow better, than the simplest and most straightforward of them all. These people are blasphemers, who would who create Ecce Mono of Ecce Homo, who would look around on a perfect summer day with cloud-dappled skies and a gentle breeze and wonder if things couldn’t be made oh so slightly better by adding I dunno a wine bar. The Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie is already the most masterful mix of flavors, the perfect proportion of chip to dough, the correct amount of crinkle, and the leading luxury in an overwrought age. They can do no better.

I mean, there are actually tips and tricks to improve your cookie a little bit. But even as I say that they mostly boil down to following the instructions. When they say cream your sugar and butter, they mean it. Mix it until the sugar is fully dissolved. Add the eggs only one at a time, preferably at room temperature, to let the sugar and butter meld even more. The flour should be put in only a bit at a go, to make the mixture smooth. The one tip not in the instructions is to maybe refrigerate the dough overnight. If it has benefits, it is to let the dough homogenize a bit more and I think maybe it does something to the edge of the cookies when you bake them and the dough is a bit cold. But that’s not totally necessary, just an added bonus when after you make your first batch you stick the rest of the dough in the fridge to make the next batch the next day.

But look, I know I’ve gone too far here. I mean, I’m still right, Nestle Tollhouse is the best, you don’t need any other cookie recipe. But the joy of baking is in the process and the sharing, and it doesn’t matter so much what cookie recipe you use if it achieves that end. This brings me to my final tip, which is the most important of all. The secret ingredient that will make every cookie delicious. The first step in any cookie recipe should be to ensure you are making them with love.