On Chocolate Chips

A snob takes on America's favorite dessert: what could go wrong?

Welcome to this week’s rant post, in which we delve into chocolate chips. There are tons of opinions and takes on there, so I’m curious to hear what you all think about this sweet but touchy subject. On Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for pumpkin donuts. I told you, we’re going hard on this fall baking thing!

There is an elaborate, confusing technicality at play in every chocolate chip cookie. 

The eponymous ‘chip’ is the stuff of highly contested legend: chips were born when Ruth Wakefield, then-chef at the now-iconic Toll House Inn, was searching for a chocolate that would keep its shape instead of melting into the dough and changing the flavor of the cookie. She chopped up pieces of her Nestlé Semi-Sweet chocolate bar into the cookie mix and made history. 

Nestlé’s classic morsels were allegedly first made into their signature shape in the 1940s, after Wakefield’s recipe became an instant hit among home bakers. At first, Nestlé printed her recipe for Toll House cookies on every bag of their semi-sweet baking chocolate (in exchange for naught but a lifetime supply of chocolate, no less. Ruth, babe! Your work has value!). After realizing that this product and recipe had prompted a veritable revolution of housewives chopping up their chocolate for cookies, the morsel was born and so was a star: the chocolate chip cookie. 

The chocolate chip cookie is right up there with apple pie in terms of the most American confections. Soldiers came home hungry for a warm chocolate chip cookie after the Toll House restaurant gift shop sent thousands of the cookies to the front during the Second World War in what could be considered the one of nation’s first guerilla marketing ploy. Much like any well-placed influencer product sent today, this campaign was a smashing success for the cookie and for Nestlé’s booming morsel business. 

By the time my 11-year-old food snob-in-the-making self stumbled onto the scene, Americans were eating so many chocolate chip cookies a year (7 billion, by some estimates), that bulk warehouse chains sold 72 oz. bags of chocolate chips. These absurdly large bags were a household staple: my family kept one in our pantry at all times and, I kid you not, every time I walked by the cabinet where it lived, I would grab a handful and toss them back. To me, to us, the chocolate chip was synonymous with chocolate itself. Nestlé’s marketing offensive had solidified the chocolate chip as a national treasure. 

It is also the single thing that takes an otherwise beautiful cookie and makes it a complete waste of space on the bakery shelf. Allow me, in all of my chocolate chip snarfing shame, to explain.

The very reason that Nestlé itself lauds their signature chips — which they call morsels — as the perfect add-in for cookies is what makes them so problematic. Morsels keep their shape when baked at 375°F for between 9-11 minutes or until golden brown. This is the secret sauce. This is what has made the chocolate chip cookie what it is. This is also what makes chips the single worst type of chocolate you can add to your cookies. 

Let’s dive into chocolate for a moment, shall we? 

Chocolate is not a universal truth or ingredient. Depending on the intended purpose, the ingredients and, in fact, the very chemistry of the chocolate varies wildly. For example, chocolate meant for eating is considerably higher in cocoa butter, a plant-based fat that is extracted from the cacao bean and used to make anything from lotions to, um, chocolate. The melting point of cocoa butter is fairly low (close to the average temperature of the human body), which is why tempering chocolate on a hot day in a tent in England is such a faff. 

At risk of me, a woman rocking a tenth grade chemistry education, going too deep, here’s why this matters: the volatility of cocoa butter is what makes chocolate so good. As the encyclopedic Harold McGee writes in his oeuvre On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, cocoa butter’s structure is the key to most of chocolate’s alluring qualities. “When carefully prepared, chocolate has a silken or glassy surface, is hard and not greasy at room temperature, breaks with a delightful snap, yet melts to a smooth creaminess in the mouth. These are very unlike the qualities of any other food, and are a consequence of the structure of the cacao fat molecules…” 

But, McGee later writes, this is also where companies can cheat chocolate. Though the U.S. government has regulations for the minimum required amount of cocoa solids and cocoa butter in chocolate (finally, my tax dollars at work on something important!), companies are obviously still free to add bare minimum of the real stuff and substitute the rest. The magical nature of cocoa butter is precisely what Nestlé is trying to change in their chips. Obviously, this is done in the name of making a better baking chocolate for the bakers of America, but given that additives are generally far more cost efficient than cacao butter, I can’t help but feel a little scammed.

By replacing a high percentage of the cocoa butter in chocolate with alternatives ranging from vegetable oils to soy lecithin, companies such as Nestlé (making their morsels) or competitors (making their chips) save a buck, use an additive, and, in the process of doing so, raise the melting temperature of the chocolate. Of course, the chocolate will still melt when you put it in a hot oven, but the difference with this baking chocolate is that it maintains its shape when it melts and cools right back into place after the cookie is removed from the oven.

And therein lies the problem. If you’re standing over a hot tray, munching on a cookie straight from the oven, that’s great. A melty chocolate chip will taste delicious. But the moment that tray (most likely metal) cools (most likely very quickly), the chip ceases to be melty and delicious and reverts back to the state it was in when you mixed it into the dough, just minus some of the fat that makes it taste good. 

Happily, we have people like Claire Saffitz, who notes in her Dessert Person: Recipes and Guidance for Baking with Confidence recipe for chocolate chip cookies that bakers should opt instead for discs, as chips “have emulsifiers that affect the consistency and melting properties of the chocolate.” We also have teams like Epicurious, who propose wildly expensive solutions. One of their suggested alternatives are the chocolate pyramids made by Dandelion Chocolate and designed by a former Tesla engineer, who, by the way, is also paid in chocolate and some stock options. What is up with these companies?

As you might guess, these pyramids—“facets”—are far more expensive than chocolate chips ($30 for a 17 oz. bag), but they do bring a certain shine to the cookie given that they were expertly designed to do exactly that by someone who designs electric vehicles. It’s also not lost on me that opting out of the traditional chocolate chip experience to appease a stranger on the internet is a choice that is budget-dependent. Paying $30 for Tesla chocolate isn’t an option for many households in the United States. 

The sweetest irony, which does not go unnoticed by bakers such as myself, is that Dandelion and Nestlé are coming at the chocolate chip cookie with the same goal: designing a chocolate that optimizes your cookie-eating experience. From these two companies come two wildly different solutions, and, like most things in the world today, the true optimal chocolate for baking likely lies between the two extremes.

My plea to you: stop using chocolate chips or morsels or whatever you’re calling them. Find, at the very least, another shape to bake into your gobs of dough. Start with a bar, meant for eating, that you chop up with a knife to make chunks. Eggs, sugar, flour, even vanilla extract: buy the cheapest of these you can. Spend the money on chocolate that isn’t just artificial emulsifiers and the minimum required cocoa butter dressed up with decades of cooking mythology. Make a batch of chocolate disc cookies so good they would change the mind of even good old Ruth at the Toll House Inn.

Thanks for sticking with me through a long-ish post! Curious to hear your thoughts on this topic, so leave a comment for me below or hit reply. See you Friday for pumpkin donuts, and back here next Tuesday for another fabulous interview!