It took several tries, but we got a solid chocolate chip that survived the bake test! Yay! It’s soft and sweet and richly chocolatey. I wanted to use a more natural sweetener but it’s going to take a bit of balancing. At least now got a workable starting point.
You may be thinking, why would I want to go through the trouble of making chocolate chips?
Because you’re a control freak like me, have a child with allergies like me, or decide there’s no way that you’re paying that much money for your own organic and natural chocolate chips, like me. The surprising win out of this whole situation is the price. I don’t have the exact cost figured out what with the vanilla and sugar, but it’s in the neighbourhood of $2.50 per batch for organic, and $2.00 of that is the cost of raw organic cacao butter.
I’ll post the recipe below, but the first thing I want to impart is the hard-earned wisdom that came with successfully making a chip proven tough enough to survive 10+ minutes at 375F in a chocolate chip cookie:
- You need a fat that’s hard-solid at room temperature. Coconut oil will not work. Upgrade to cacao butter.
- Cacao butter is too irregularly shaped to measure by volume, so have a scale.
- Make sure that your cacao butter is food-grade (some isn’t).
- Chocolate begins to burn at somewhere between 115-120F, so keep the temps low and use a double-boiler.
- Milk, even if you use soy milk, appears to play a strange role in making the chocolate firmer. I discovered this by accident. What happens is that the chocolate has seized because of the water in the milk (liquid causes chocolate to seize). But it actually seems to make the chip less prone to melting, too.
- The success of the recipe is striking a balance between solids and (non-oil) liquids. This sounds like a duh thing, but to expand on this: a granular sugar will NOT dissolve sufficiently in melted oil alone. Case in point: think of the finished crisp sugar texture of a cookie.
- If you have too much liquid, it will be melty and/or not set properly. This is what happened when I used 100% maple syrup instead of granular sugar. I got a substance that for lack of better definition I ended up calling chocolate flubber (which was still actually pretty good). I should have bake tested it.
- If you don’t have enough liquid, you’ll have grit. This is what happened when I experimented using sucanat, although I didn’t understand it at the time, because reasons. It also happened when I used evaporated cane (golden) sugar, though to a lesser extent, and this time I understood what was going on.
This is cacao butter. It costs about $16 a pound at the local health supply. Better prices may be had, I really haven’t shopped around (not too many places opt to carry it). It is a naturally chunky looking solid white rock of oil that smells very strongly of chocolate.
Ok, so on to the recipe! (Makes about 1.5 cups of chocolate chips)
- 2 oz raw cocoa butter
- 1/2 cup dutch-process cocoa powder
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar – I used evaporated cane juice (brown sugar, and probably even sucanat will probably work now with the new recipe, but I haven’t tested it yet. Each will impart their own taste, fair warning, and may require more or less milk to dissolve)
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tbsp milk (regular or soy)
In a double boiler, or a widemouth glass jar in a pot of water, start the cocoa butter melting on medium heat. Add sugar, cocoa powder, and vanilla once a little oil has liquified. Stir the mixture frequently with a spatula. Once the cocoa butter is nearly melted, turn off the heat, and continue stirring until completely melted.
At this stage, the chocolate will be extremely liquid, look a little oily and slightly gritty on your spatula. Here’s where the magic comes in. Add the milk, stirring, gradually in teaspoons (3tsp in a tablespoon). The sugar will dissolve and the chocolate will congeal into a form that is soft, but no longer liquid and no longer gritty. It’s almost like it forms tiny, soft grains that compress into a smooth mass when it cools if you’re so inclined to pipe it or roll it out (seized chocolate). You can’t melt it, so don’t turn up the heat. I don’t know how else to describe it, so a picture’s worth 1000 words:
Spread the chocolate mixture evenly on a large plate using the spatula and put it in the fridge to set, about 30 minutes. The chocolate will be set but soft and easy to dislodge from the plate onto a cutting board. You can chop it fine or crumble it easily with your fingers. I chopped it into pieces approximately the size of regular store-bought chips for a more accurate bake test.
So, how did it turn out? Pretty good! And it held up beautifully, as you can see. This is a small cookie straight out of the oven, baked 375F for 11 minutes, so you can see the chip is warm enough to be soft in the middle just like a store bought chip, but it didn’t turn into ooze.
UPDATE: 7/6/15 – I’ve been playing around with chocolate chips again, and I’ve created a semi sweet recipe (no soy or dairy) that still survives baking fairly well and looks more like regular chocolate, if you’re looking for an option for making chocolate bars, candies, and bark. You can find it here:
Hey, this is awesome! I love when there’s a food staple that is always assumed needs to be store-bought but then it turns out you can totally make it at home! Very cool. I will have to see if I can find cocoa butter at a health food store around here.
Thanks,
Jon
Hey Jon, welcome to my site :). Let me know how yours turn out, I’m always interested in improving through crowd sourcing ;). Gotta make a second batch already!
I have some answers to your question about the chemical reaction between proteins and chocolate. Cocoa powder’s acidity is an advantage since it causes the proteins in baked goods to set rapidly. Van Houten, who developed his process for making cocoa powder, also began treating the beans, nibs, liquor, or powder with an alkaline solution. This changes the color dramatically, changes the flavor, and produces a slight physical swelling of the cocoa particles, making them dissolve more easily. It also neutralizes free acids to give the cocoa powder a milder taste. When a baked product is no longer acidic, it may not set (this would cause cookies to flatten and cakes that will not get done). Dutch process cocoa is not interchangeable with natural cocoa powder because of the problems its alkalinity can cause. A recipe that works perfectly with natural cocoa may not work with Dutch process. The strong alkalinity of the Dutch process chocolate may reduce the acidity of the batter to the point that the proteins will no longer set and you may have soup. At high altitudes, acidity is vital to set cakes quickly before they lose their leavening and fall. No Dutch process cocoa for cakes at high altitudes! More info regarding releasing flavor, cocoa acting like flour, and acidity problems can be found in the article at: http://acselementsofchocolate.typepad.com/elements_of_chocolate/cocoa.html
More information about the chemical reaction between proteins and cocoa can be found at: https://www.google.com/#q=chemical+reaction+between+proteins+and+cocoa.
I love it. Thanks Rebecca! I love learning some of the background chemistry involved in food (so much to know!). I knew some vague info about the alkalinity, mostly in regards to cake baking and why cocoa powder sometimes turns red or why you need to add acid sometimes in certain recipes (ie vinegar in depression cake), but I didn’t know all this. That’s great trivia too about high altitude baking. Fortunately I haven’t had to worry about altitude conversions. Thank you so much for sharing. Chocolate chips have been on my revisit experimentation list to fool around with some more, this time with cacao paste and cacao butter instead of the powder and butter… these tasted lovely and held up fine, they were just “ugly.”
It looks like its been almost a year since your comment on trying to make chocolate chips with cacao paste, have you tried it yet? I’m very curious.
You know what, Wendy? It sort of slipped my mind! BUT I do still have the cacao paste stored in the freezer and I’m thinking that it’s past time to revisit this… I have soy lecithin left over from making homemade vegan margarine, too. Not that these ones were terribly unstable before, though, actually… they held up fine at room temperature till they were gobbled down by others… but I’m thinking the lecithin could help stabilize a liquid natural sweetener like maple syrup or honey. It’s a good time of year to play! 😀
Do you have Lecithin liquid or granules? The liquid is sooo sticky, I like the granules better but how would you use them?
I’ve only ever been able to find the granules, and it came in a pretty sizeable bag, so I’ve got a bunch to use up. Lecithin dissolves in fat, so it should be fairly easy to add a little bit to the melted coco butter. I was reading that lecithin can improve the snap quality in poorly tempered chocolate, possibly making a firmer chunk. Sounds like something fun to try anyway 🙂
Is there anything I can use instead if the cocoa butter?
Hi Mae
There’s many variations on the chocolate chips that use other oils, including coconut, but they seldom survive baking. The cacao butter has a pretty high melting point, so if it needs to survive the oven? There’s not too many easy-to-acquire edible substitutes.
Good luck!