Okay, I watched the video and that cookie was bound to be awful.

• the chocolate was 100% dark, you need to add sugar and/or milk. Most chocolate chips are semi sweet.
• was that flour even baking flour?
• something was definitely off with that egg, there was no adhesion.
• he mismeasured like 4 things due to spillage not tared out. Probably no real difference.
• I’m suspicious the vanilla extract was done correctly.
• his mixing sucked
• an oil based cookie is going to have less flavour than butter based.
• the actual cook was done wrong because he removed it from the oven. The stuff he saw on the top was likely due to bad mixing, the cracks due to flour. When he removed it and put it back in the vacuum oven it would have just suctioned the cookie outwards instead of rising inside.

Plus, there was no control cookie from grandma.

I've watched every last video, including his collabs with TBS, MGG and Co. Even in his latest stuff with the cheap Chinese equipment and objective project failures, he's not usually this inept. Ingredients weren't pure, they were standard. Flour was a decade old, leavener was so old it didn't work.

Usually, he has a sound idea that fails in execution, either as a schtick or in reality.

This one was ill-conceived as NIST isn't pure, he failed to follow the ingredients, he failed to substitute properly, for the amount of money he spent on the cookie, he got nothing right, and there was nothing interesting about the failure.

White chocolate AND cranberry. On its own, no clearly it isn't better than dark chocolate. But, as a combination in the context of chewy cookies, it's definitely better.

With a dried fruit modifier, white is better than dark. The real question is: is a chocolate chip cookie better than a white chocolate cranberry, and i think that answer is yes.

But a dark chocolate cranberry is meh at best.

Alton brown isn't browning his butter. That's a definite win for Kenji Lopez-Alt