12 Big Mistakes Everyone Makes When Baking With Chocolate Chips

Is there anyone out there who doesn't love chocolate chips? If so, we don't wanna know them. Chocolate chips are arguably the most joyous of all the baking ingredients, and imbue everything from chocolate chip cookies, to cookie dough, to blondies with a pop of rich flavor and undeniable crunch. Plus, they're easy to use, right? Well, folks, you'd be surprised. For such a common and popular ingredient, chocolate chips are devilishly easy to misuse. While they're never outright bad when included in baking recipes, you're likely doing some things that are stopping them from being the best they can be.

It all starts with the kind of chocolate chips you're buying. These little nuggets of chocolate don't just come in one-size-fits-all: There are dozens of different kinds out there, made with different ingredients and formed into various sizes, and picking the wrong kind will affect your bakes. Once you've got the right type of chocolate chips, you then need to learn how to use them right — and to stop them from sinking to the bottom of your cake. Thankfully, we called in the pros to teach us, and you, how to handle chocolate chips properly. We spoke to award-winning chef Toni Roberts from the Ritz Carlton Chicago, and Rory Kandel, pastry chef and owner of Rory's Bakehouse, to get the lowdown on all things chocolate chips and to learn how to avoid getting them wrong.

In our humble opinion, recipes that have chocolate chips are usually popular for one reason: The fact that they have chocolate chips in them. With each bite, you get a glorious burst of chocolate, with everything held together by sugary, delicious pastry. Because they're the star ingredient, you need to make sure that you buy the right chocolate chips in the first place. Unfortunately, this is where so many people stumble, reaching for the first option they find in-store, and then wondering why their desserts don't taste as good.

The key is to check the ingredients list. "As with any other chocolate, less ingredients are better," advises Toni Roberts. "Anything other than cacao, cocoa butter, sugar, and emulsifiers such as soy or sunflower lecithin, and maybe vanilla extract is filler."

Roberts also states that you should keep an eye out for the presence of milk. "If the chips are to be semi to bittersweet they should not contain milk. A lot do, but the higher-end chocolate chips will not." You may have to pay a little more for the best chocolate chips, especially those that aren't bulked out with milk. What you'll get in return, though, is rich, deep flavor.

Chocolate chips sinking to the bottom of bakes usually isn't an issue for flatter items that have a thicker batter, like chocolate chip cookies. However, if you're making something with a lighter batter like a chocolate-studded cake, you may find that your chocolate chips have collected in a pool at the bottom. This will occur if your chips are heavier than the batter itself, which causes gravity to do its work before the batter has a chance to firm up in the oven, and it's more likely to happen if you're using bigger chips.

Thankfully, there's one workaround you can use for this that tends to do the trick. "Chocolate chips tend to sink to the bottom of batters if they aren't thick enough. Tossing them in a little flour will help with this," says Rory Kandel. The flour on your chocolate chips acts as a glue, holding them in place in all but the thinnest batters. Only add a small amount of flour and make sure to shake off any excess, as you don't want them to taste chalky. Kandel also points out that this is a great method if you're making anything with blueberries, and it can also be used to stop nuts from sinking to the bottom of cakes and pastries.

When you cook chocolate chips, they'll soften and begin to melt — but when you're baking with them, they'll still remain largely distinct from the batter itself. Then, when your baked goods cool, your chocolate chips will re-solidify, turning into small nuggets of pure flavor. Somewhat surprisingly, though, this can be a real problem sometimes. "Chocolate chips are too hard [when] cold, causing the consumer to heavily chew before the chocolate can even be tasted," says Toni Roberts. As a result, using chocolate chips in items that are destined to be cold may ruin things.

Therefore, you may want to avoid using chocolate chips entirely in these dishes. "If your item is to be served cold, use something more delicate such as shavings," states Roberts. Chocolate shavings supply immediate chocolate flavor without an overly hard texture, although it's worth remembering that they're more likely to melt entirely into your baked item. Chocolate shavings or curls are pretty easy to find in supermarkets or specialty baking stores. If you can't find them, though, you can make them at home. Just grab a bar of chocolate and a knife, and gently scrape the top of the chocolate to skim off small pieces.

The average home baker may not think too much about cacao content, but they really should. When it comes to chocolate chips, the cacao content will be a huge clue to their flavor, which will in turn affect the flavor of your baked items. Cacao content will determine how chocolatey your chocolate chips will taste, and the more cacao that's in there, the stronger the flavor will be. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that your chips will be tastier if they're higher in cacao, as when you have more of the ingredient you have less space for additions like sugar and milk, which can smooth out flavors and make things more palatable.

As a general rule of thumb, the more cacao there is, the more bitter your chocolate chips are. Regular milk chocolate will have a fairly low cacao percentage, and will be sweeter and milder. Having said this, there are varieties of milk chocolate chips that will have a higher cacao content, so will have more bitter notes that may not be preferable for kids (or for you). Therefore, don't trust that your chocolate chips will be sweet every time, especially if you're buying specially-made or small-batch items.

Here's the thing: Sometimes you have to melt your chocolate chips, folks. It may not give you as good of a taste as melting a quality bar of chocolate, but in a pinch, chocolate chips can be softened and used for your purposes. If you try and do this too quickly, though, you'll completely ruin whatever you're making. "Chocolate burns very easily and it's best to keep it low and slow," warns Rory Kandel.

Instead, take your time. "The best way to melt chocolate chips is very gently and slowly in the microwave or by using a gentle double boiler," says Kandel. Toni Roberts agrees, stating that the best method to melt chocolate chips is to use "short blasts in the microwave, stirring in between. You can also set a bowl over simmering water. Either method needs to be monitored to avoid burning." Bear in mind that chocolate chips will usually melt pretty quickly, due to their smaller size. If you are going to use the microwave method, the shorter the blasts the better: Stick to around 10 seconds per heating cycle. It may be annoying to pull them in and out of the microwave, but it'll be worth it.

If you're standing in the baking aisle staring at endless bags of chocolate chips, it can be hard to start to tell the difference between them. So you'd think that one of the easiest ways to start determining what you want is by name — and surely, products that are labeled as "chocolate chips" will be different from "chocolate morsels," right? Wrong.

The difference between chocolate chips and morsels is basically in name alone: It's just what the company that makes them chooses to call them. In terms of how you use them, chocolate chips and morsels are pretty much completely interchangeable. Unless they designate that they're different sizes, you shouldn't see too much difference in terms of dimensions, and so you can swap them at will. However, what you should keep an eye on is the difference in ingredients between morsels and chips. While they don't differ in terms of size, they may well differ in terms of make-up, and you might find that morsels and chips have fairly distinct flavors. The best thing to do is to taste-test a few different brands to see which one you like best. Hey, those extra chocolate chips probably aren't going to go to waste.

When you're just starting out as a baker, it's easy to blindly follow recipes to the letter — and guys, we get it. As you've probably heard many times before, baking is a science, and rocking the boat by tweaking your ingredients can lead to disastrous consequences. What you shouldn't be afraid to tweak, though, is how many chocolate chips are in your recipe. While things like flour, butter, and sugar need to be at set quantities for things to come out of the oven at their most delicious, you can alter chocolate chips to your will, and still have things come out being tasty.

As for how many you should add? "This is totally personal preference," says Toni Roberts. "The recipe that I use has chocolate chunks taking up about ⅓ of the total recipe by weight." Generally speaking, using less will be less risky than using more, as if you overdo it on chocolate chips you may end up stopping your batter from having the coverage it needs to firm up properly.

Anyone who told you that baking with chocolate chips is easy has clearly never used white chocolate chips before. Okay, so that's a bit of an over-exaggeration — white chocolate chips aren't too tricky to use, but you do need to watch how long you're cooking them for. The problem with white chocolate chips is that they can overbake pretty quickly, developing a caramelized surface that alters both their flavor and their color. This may not be what you want if you're trying to keep things clean and simple.

Luckily, help is at hand. "A tip for avoiding overbaking is to remember that when you take a baking sheet of cookies out of the oven, it still has a lot of residual heat, so the cookies will cook a little more even out of the oven," explains 1 Hotel South Beach's Pastry Chef John Martine over at Food & Wine. "You want to pull your cookies out at least two minutes early, and let them finish 'baking' on the cookie sheet while they cool. This way, your white chocolate will stay perfectly white and delicious."

Chocolate chips come in all different shapes and sizes, and not every kind will work for what you're baking. For example, if you're making jumbo-sized cookies, going for teeny chocolate chips will just leave them swamped in the dough. Conversely, if you're making a light, airy chocolate chip angel food cake, opting for massive chunks of chocolate will totally ruin the fluffy, delicate texture.

You therefore want to make sure that the size you're using is appropriate to your recipe. Toni Roberts broke it all down for us. "Chocolate chips come in a variety of sizes," she says. "They are listed by count per pound, so the most common size is 1,000 chips per pound. This is what a classic Toll House chip is. They go down to mini size at 10,000 count per pound all the way up to chunks." While Roberts advises thinking about your personal preference when it comes to size, she does reveal what she goes for — sometimes, at least. "I personally like chocolate chunks in my cookies as opposed to chips," she states.

What do you do if you end up with chocolate chips that are too large for your bake? Unlike regular bars of chocolate, these things can be nightmares to break down further: Trying to chop them up can take hours due to their small size, and grating them will take even longer (and may cause you to shred your fingers in the process). You're then faced with a dilemma: Do I put them in my recipe anyway and hope for the best, potentially ruining things in the process, or go out and spend even more money?

Guys, you don't have to do either. Grind them instead. Chocolate chips can be ground "so they are more like flecks. This would help for a more even distribution," says Toni Roberts. You can do this with a grater, but if you have a coffee grinder, this takes mere seconds. Just dump your chocolate chips into the grinder, and whiz them until they're your desired consistency. If you have larger batches of chocolate chips, you can put them in your food processor. Just make sure you don't walk away from whatever machine you're using, as you may end up breaking them down too much. If they're too small, they'll just melt into your batter as they bake.

Okay, so here's the thing: Just because you can melt chocolate chips, doesn't mean you should. "I am of the opinion that chocolate chips should be used as inclusions, as opposed to melting down and blending into a recipe," says Toni Roberts. Chocolate chips can melt into perfectly fine chocolate, but you might find that the taste you're left with is slightly sub-par compared to other options out there. If your recipe calls for a good amount of melted chocolate and it's going to be one of the main flavor notes in the finished item, you should go for an alternative source. "A nice chocolate couverture or bar should be used for this. It will have better quality and blend nicer," Roberts states.

Having said all this, there are times when you don't have any option but to use chocolate chips — and other times when you won't want to go out and buy a new bar of chocolate, not least a pricey one. High-quality chocolate can be very expensive, and if you're just making a quick batch of chocolate honeycomb or rocky road slices for your kids, melted chocolate chips will be totally fine. Just don't expect the world from them.

When milk and dark chocolate chips are fresh, they have a smooth, shiny, and deeply alluring brown surface. However, when you leave them in your pantry for too long, they can start to look a little bit chalky. This chalkiness occurs as a result of something called "fat bloom," which happens when the fats in the chocolate break down and then recrystallize on the chocolate's outer layer. This will happen more quickly if you keep your chocolate in warm environments. The chalky appearance can be a little unappetizing to some folks, who assume that the chocolate's somehow collected dust or else has spoiled.

The good news, though, is that neither of these things is true. When chocolate chips develop fat bloom, it simply means that their composition has changed slightly in its balance. The chocolate chips will still be totally safe to eat. In fact, using chocolate chips in baking recipes (or, indeed, using any other bloomed chocolate you have) is a good way to slightly mask the bloom, as each piece will be coated in batter, making their slightly dusty appearance harder to discern. It's always important to taste-test bloomed chocolate, though, as its flavor can change somewhat the longer it sits. Plus, if you have any fears that your chocolate has spoiled or gone rancid, you should always throw it out.