Chocolate chips for cooking, melting and chocolate fountains.
Chocolate chips are a versatile ingredient used in desserts like cookies, muffins, pancakes, waffles, cakes, and various pastries.
However, most chocolate producers have a slightly different version of chocolate chips – these are chocolate chips designed to melt to create liquid chocolate for moulding, baking and tempering.
Available in a variety of shapes and sizes, chocolate chip are mainly tear shaped drops of chocolate or chocolate buttons. All of the different shapes are designed to melt quicker and make them easier to weigh out.
Brand Chocolate Chips
Callebaut Callets: small, disc-shaped pieces of chocolate.
Martin’s Chocolatier Couverture Buttons: dollops of chocolate, shaped like buttons.
Valrhona Chocolate for Baking: individually moulded chocolate chips.
Amedei Drops: a similar shape to buttons, but smaller and more domed.
Chocolate Chip Tempering
For chocolatiers, tempering chocolate is a crucial technique. It involves careful heating, cooling, and reheating to give the finished chocolate an exceptionally glossy finish, smooth mouthfeel, and a pleasing ‘snap’ when broken or bitten into.
Tempering with chocolate chips is a process that stabilizes the cocoa butter in the chocolate. Once melted, the chocolate is cooled by stirring continuously. Chocolate chips can be adding, as the chips are already in temper, this encourage the formation of stable beta crystals. This technique is known as “seeding,”
