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All About Chocolate Chips

If you have a sweet tooth you’re probably familiar with chocolate chips, but did you know that May 15^th is National Chocolate Chip Day? Chocolate chips are an essential part of many recipes, like chocolate chip cookies. How much do you know about these delicious bite-sized morsels? Find out all about chocolate chips!

Nestle issued small chopping tools with their chocolate bars to make chocolate chips

Chocolate Chip Creation

Ruth Graves Wakefield of the Toll House Inn invented chocolate chips!

We’re used to seeing chocolate chips as small, flat and round or teardrop shaped—perfect for slipping into baked goods like muffins and cookies, but the first chocolate chips looked more like their name, tiny chunks of chocolate that were broken off from a larger bar.

In fact chocolate chips were created specifically for chocolate chip cookies! In 1937 Ruth Graves Wakefield from the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts created a new kind of cookie when she added cut up pieces of semi-sweet Nestle bar to her recipe. The cookies were a wild success and pretty soon Nestle was knocking on her door asking to put her recipe on their chocolate bar’s packaging in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate! In fact Nestle not only added the recipe to the packaging but also included a small chopping tool. By 1941 they started creating chocolate chips as an ingredient to sell separately. The Nestle brand Toll House is named after the inventor Ruth Wakefield’s inn, but there are lots of different companies that now produce chocolate chips.

In 1997 Massachusetts honored its historical chocolate chip association by declaring that the chocolate chip cookie was The Official State Cookie!

Choice of Chips

Chocolate chips may have started out as semi-sweet, but since their invention there have been many delicious variations on these tiny treats, such as:

white chocolate
dark chocolate
milk chocolate
bittersweet
peanut butter
butterscotch
mint chocolate
white and dark swirl

In The Mix

in 1997 Massachusetts declared chocolate chip cookies The Official State Cookie

You can add chocolate chips to all kinds of different recipes to give your sweet treat a flavor boost, here’s a few of our faves!

Cookies
Muffins
Banana Bread
Pancakes
Crepes
Waffles
Cakes
Trail Mix
Rice Crispy Squares
Ice Cream Sundaes
Granola Bars
S’mores

Hot Tip!

Because chocolate chips are made to retain their shape they don’t melt as easily as baking chocolate (which has more cocoa butter in it), but you can still use them to make chocolate sauces or melt them for ooey gooey goodies-just remember that they melt best between 104 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Who doesn’t enjoy slipping their chocolate chip cookies back in the oven or in the microwave to enjoy those melted morsels?