Chocolate Funk - Making Chocolate Chips

Making Chocolate Chips

Are you interested in making chocolate chips? If so, good for you for being so industrious! Here are the main ingredients (but we don't have an exact recipe):

Sugar
Chocolate liquor
Cocoa butter
Butteroil (not sure what that is)
Soy lecithin (an emulsifier)
Pure vanilla

If you don't want to buy cocoa and the ingredients listed above to make your own sweet or semi-sweet chocolate, you can buy semi-sweet and sweet chocolate from suppliers from Nestle to Godiva. It will come in block form for your convenience. Once you have the chocolate, the trick to making chocolate chips is getting the chocolate into the chip shape. Unless you have a lot of money to buy your own chocolate chip making machine, you would have to melt the chocolate and use a decorators tip to shape each chip individually onto wax paper. Then they would need to set up in a cool, dry place. Then you'd have to store them in an airtight container.

Maybe the shape isn't that important to you. In fact, when chocolate chips were first invented, it was by accident. You may have heard of Ruth Wakefield. She's the one who invented the chocolate chip cookie. She had been making a popular cookie at the Toll House Inn in New Bedford, MA for years. Then one day, she decied to put small bits of semi-sweet chocolate into her cookies, thinking they would melt. But they didn't. Instead, they got soft, but held their shape. The cookie was popular, and became what we know today as the Nestle Toll House cookie. (The Nestle company heard about the cookie and made a deal with Nestle. They wanted the recipe so they could put it on their semi-sweet chocolate bar wrapper. In exchange, she got a lifetime supply of chocolate from Nestle. In 1939, Nestle packaged the chocolate in bits, and chocolate chips were born. So even though Mrs. Wakefield came up with the Toll House Cookie recipe, Nestle is credited with making chocolate chips for the first time. Now lots of companies are making chocolate chips in lots of varieties. They come in semi-sweet, dark chocolate, white chocolate and milk chocolate. Ghiradelli even makes Double Chocolate Chips.

You might be the best baker in the world and prefer to make everything from scratch, but when it comes to making chocolate chips, you're probably better off just buying some--unless you have the patience of Job.