Chocolate desserts are an exquisite mix of gooey, decadent, and rich that I always want to bake, but when I look at a recipe, I feel my wallet squirm in discomfort – there’s so much chocolate. Too much chocolate isn’t a bad thing but shopping for a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s worth of chocolate can stretch a shopping budget to its limits. So it got me thinking – can you swap out chocolate baking bars for affordable bags of chocolate chips?
Chocolate isn’t all the same, and if you look at a bag of chocolate chips, you’ll notice that these morsels are not pure chocolate. Chocolate chips are a unique blend of cocoa solids, sugar, and soy lecithin. Though it sounds like a wonky chemical, soy lecithin is just a common additive that helps foods maintain their shape. When you bake up chocolate chip cookies, the chocolate chips melt, but as the cookies cool, the soy lecithin helps the chocolate chips hold their distinct teardrop shape.
But when it comes to making other things like ganaches, cake batters, and candies, can you swap the higher-priced bars for common chocolate chips? The answer is yes…most of the time. Even though the fat and chocolate ratios are different, you can swap out chocolate bars for ganaches, sauces, frostings, and cakes. If the chocolate is seizing, add a tiny bit of warmed-up canola or coconut oil, the fat will smooth the seizing chocolate and you won’t have a chocolate fail on your hands.
When making candies, you cannot substitute chocolate bars, the additives in the chocolate chips are hard to temper, and more often than not, you’ll get a dull chocolate coating. For chocolate candy making you can’t add a lot of oil so, if you melt the chocolate wrong you won’t be able to fix the chalky appearance.
So the trick to using chocolate chips in baking? A slow melt is the key to perfectly melted chocolate chips. Using the microwave, cook the chocolate chips in 15-second intervals and stir each time. When stirred, the warmed chocolate chips melt the surrounding chips without seizing the chocolate into a clumpy mess.