Are Shipped and Frozen Levain Cookies as Tasty as Fresh? We Tasted All Three, for Science

If you’re a non-New Yorker who’s wondering if they’re worth the hype, the answer is heck yes. Make sure you’re sitting down with napkins at the ready when you taste your first fresh chocolate chip walnut Levain cookie: It’s six ounces of pure, unadulterated bliss. The crisp, golden brown exterior is the ultimate foil for the underbaked, dare we say doughy, interior. The outside provides bonus crunch to the chopped walnuts, while the chocolate chips practically gushing from the tender center offer sweetness, nuance and all the nostalgia. The biggest leg up that the fresh cookies have over the shipped and frozen ones is their drool-worthy scent. (Attention Levain: Have you considered making cookie-scented candles?) BTW, if you’re allergic to nuts or just don’t like them, the two-chip chocolate chip cookie—brimming with semi-sweet and dark chocolate chips—is the pick for you.

These are as close as out-of-towners can get to from-the-bakery Levain cookies. And TBH, they’re almost identical. The shipped, full-size cookies are baked to order, so they arrive as close to fresh as humanly possible—never stale. You can also request a specific delivery date (which is especially helpful if you’re sending the cookies as a gift) that the bakery will try their best to adhere to, despite ever-persistent Covid delays.

Of course, the shipped cookies won’t arrive warm, but you can easily revert them to their gooey original state by popping them in the oven for a few minutes. We’ll also say that they last an impressively long time; it took us about a week to finish our four-pack, and due to the cookies’ underbaked, moist centers, they never really dried out to the point of staleness. The shipped cookies are easily the best option for people who don’t live near a Levain bakery.

If there’s a Whole Foods near you, odds are this NYC delicacy is within your chocolate-loving reach. The cookies are pre-baked, so you don’t have to worry about your unpredictable oven throwing a wrench in dessert by under- or over-baking dough. (It also means the cookies only need 5 to 7 minutes to turn warm and melty, meaning you can sink your teeth in ASAP.)

Each box contains eight 2-ounce cookies, so they’re a third of the weight of the fresh and shipped varieties. This may seem like a flat-out con, given that Levain cookies are known for their size, but we’d argue that the smaller ones offer a faraway eater the chance to snack on—and finish—a perfectly warm cookie every time. (The full-size ones are peak decadence in the best way but finishing them at their freshest in one sitting can be a tall order; the smaller ones are admittedly more practical for everyday noshing.) They’re also the most affordable option at $1.25 a pop, versus $5 at the bakery and $6.75 shipped.

Our one bone to pick? Because they’re significantly thinner, they don’t have that impossibly chewy, slightly underbaked center like the full-size cookies. In terms of texture, they’re mostly soft all around, as opposed to crisp on the outside and famously doughy on the inside. Newbies certainly won’t be disappointed, but if you’ve had the big cookies before, you’ll likely feel the frozen ones don’t compare.