Chocolate Chips Vs Morsels: What's The Difference?

If you're baking a sweet treat that calls for chocolate, understanding your options is essential for ensuring your recipe turns out properly. You can find things like baking chocolate, chocolate chips, chocolate morsels, and chocolate chunks in the baking aisle of your local grocery store — but the differences might not always be what you'd expect. When it comes to the difference between chocolate morsels and chocolate chips, the reality is that it's really only a matter of the name.

Chips and morsels are the same thing: small pieces of chocolate that include stabilizers to help them retain their shape during the baking process. The best chocolate chip brands all refer to the tasty pieces differently. Nestlé uses the term "morsels," while other large chocolate brands like Hershey's call them "chips." Whatever you call them, they're teardrop-shaped and can be made from different types of chocolate such as dark, milk, semi-sweet, and white chocolate.

Chocolate chips and morsels are great for baking because they don't melt and spread out as much as other forms of chocolate. If you're baking chocolate chip cookies, for example, using the chips instead of a chopped up bar of baking chocolate will help keep the chocolate from running into the rest of the cookie. A fun fact about the crazy origins of chocolate chips is that they were actually invented after the chocolate chip cookie. Before Nestlé began selling chocolate morsels, it sold a tool for people to chop up the chocolate on their own. However, it then began selling pre-cut chocolate in the form of morsels in response to the popularity of the cookie recipe.

Chocolate morsels and chips are great for making cookies, but you really shouldn't be using chocolate chips for melting. The added stabilizers that help them keep their shape make them more difficult to melt, and they usually contain less cocoa butter, which is essential for melting. If you don't want to bake anything but are craving a sweet snack, a handful of chocolate chips is never a bad idea, either.