Chocolate chips

[aaronatthedoublef]

I was picking up some chocolate for mother's day at a small, local chocolate shop. The chocolatier was there and told me something interesting. He said chocolate chips are a compound chocolate and while they may have different tastes to start, after baking they are all the same.

Could this be true? Most of the pastry chefs I know swear by Guitard which are pretty tasty but also spendy. Can I really just buy the big bad of Kirkland (which he said was pretty high quality).

TIA

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[Mike Nolan]

I can tell you from decades of baking chocolate chip cookies that the brand and variety of the chocolate chip does make a difference in side-by-side tests. In terms of the grocery store name brands, I prefer Hershey's over Nestles.

If you're going to melt them and use them in something like a cake, that might make them a little harder to tell apart, especially if you're also adding cocoa powder.

Milk chocolate chips are very different from semi-sweet chips The dark chocolate chips have a higher percentage of cocoa solids, and usually less sugar.

I stay away from the really cheap house brands, they taste waxy, probably because they scrimp on the actual cocoa products in the chip and use cheaper oils. (Some of the cheap ones can't legally call themselves chocolate.)

The size can make a difference, too. The mini chips seem to almost disappear into the cookie, the big chunk ones will usually become a soft pocket of chocolate in the cookie, hardening a bit over time.

I tend to keep Callabaut couverture callets (semi-sweet and milk chocolate) on hand, but that's because I buy them in large bags. (I'm afraid to find out what an 11 pound bag of them will cost now!)

Valhrona and Scharffenberger are good couverture grade chocolates as well; Guittard and Ghiradelli are OK but I think they're a step down from the couverture grade chocolates.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I've noticed differences in semisweet chips beyond the amount of cocoa they contain. I always considered Guittard a step up from Ghirardelli. For example, their white chocolate has cocoa butter and Ghirardelli does not.

I checked the ingredients in Guittard chips and Callebaut bulk chocolate the other day and with the exception of the extra dark 70% chips the first ingredient in Guittard is sugar. In Callebaut it is cocoa. Is bulk chocolate consider coverture? I have some Callebaut callets. They don't have the same mouth feel when uncooked as chocolate chips. I am starting to use them instead of the bulk chocolate because I am lazy and I don't have to break them down. They're also harder to find than bulk which I can buy at the grocery store. I have to order the callets.

[Mike Nolan]

From the World Wide Chocolates site:

Couverture chocolate is classified as a higher-quality baking chocolate due to it containing a higher percentage of cocoa solids and cocoa butter.

I've seen couverture grade chocolate available in chip form, in callets (essentially larger chips), in chunk form, in small bar form and in large bar form. There are some advantages to each shape, depending on what you're doing with it. If you're melting them, the shape really doesn't matter except that it might speed up the process of melting them.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. So with the possible exception of the extra dark, Guittard is probably not couverture.

I think I'll compare Guittard with Nestles and Kirkland and Ghirardelli. I may not find exact information but I can usually find the percentage of cocoa.

[Mike Nolan]

You'll find most of the consumer brands are pretty secretive about the percentages of cocoa solids and cocoa butter in their products, most of the professional products are very open about that same information, because they know professional confectioners need that information to produce the desired results. (In chocolate school there was considerable discussion about what happens at various levels of cocoa solids and cocoa butter, and we made a couple of similar recipes adjusting the amount of cocoa butter to see for ourselves what happened.)

The exceptions at the retail level appear to be in the dark chocolate products, where 60% vs 72% or whatever cacao is used more as a marketing tool.

One of the big differences between a couverture chocolate and a coating (or compound) chocolate is that the coating/compound ones generally don't need to be tempered before using. (Whether they would temper properly is debatable, since tempering is the process of controlling the formation of the cocoa butter fat states, and if there's not much cocoa butter, there's nothing to temper.)

I find this page helpful, I have the chart taped to a kitchen cabinet door:

The Polymorphs of Chocolate

[Mike Nolan]

Some Kirkland products are excellent, some are not, and if they change suppliers, the quality of the product could go up or down. There's been a lot of online debate recently over some Kirkland products that have changed, and not for the better.

I've been using Kirkland cream cheese for the cheesecake, and we reallly like the Kirkland Keto Snack Mix. We use heavy cream instead of milk for cooking these days, and I tend to get my heavy cream at WalMart or Aldi, their price is better. The last package I got at Aldi was REALLY thick.

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