While Duff Goldman’s secret for perfectly gooey cookies involves removing your confections from the oven a bit earlier than expected, using the right kind of chocolate is mandatory. Though, not every home chef is necessarily selective about the chocolate in their homemade cookies. However, if you’re someone who’s constantly craving soft cookies dotted with distinct puddles of melted chocolate, use a chopped chocolate bar over standard chocolate chips in your go-to recipe.
Among the plethora of mistakes that will totally ruin your chocolate chip cookies, you may want to think twice before using conventional chocolate chips. Many varieties tend to include stabilizing ingredients. These additives work to ensure chocolate chips’ uniform shape remains intact, even under high-heat conditions. Therefore, standard chocolate chips may not melt entirely, which is an integral characteristic of soft and luscious chocolate chip cookies.
On the other hand, specialty chocolate bars tend to have fewer ingredients and a higher percentage of cocoa butter. This extra cocoa butter leads to better meltability, ultimately creating gooier cookies. Chocolate bars also cover a more significant amount of surface area.
A cut chocolate bar not only results in decent chunks but also flecks and shards, which can make for all-around, better tasting cookies. Lastly, when you opt for baking bars, the cacao percentage is boldly noted on the packaging. Therefore, you can better select the most appropriate variety for any particular cookie recipe you choose.
Use more than one variety of chocolate to create the best-tasting chocolate chip cookies
While you may be partial to semi-sweet chocolate, consider using more than one variety to give your next batch of cookies an ultimate flavor upgrade. Upgrade your cookies by incorporating more than one brand of semi-sweet chocolate or by using your own special combination of milk and dark chocolate bars.
When making the jump from chocolate chips to bars, you instantly have more options to choose from, especially if you’re perusing the high-end candy aisle and baking aisle of grocery stores like Whole Foods Market. When it comes to dark chocolate, aim for a variety that contains more than 60% cacao. While most dark chocolate bars range between 30% to 85%, 70% is dark enough to give your cookies a complex taste but also has an undercurrent of sweetness.
Conversely, when selecting the right bar of milk chocolate, aim for a variety that contains at least 20% cacao. Anything less than that may be too sweet when incorporated into sweet-tasting cookie dough. Using a variety of chopped milk, semi-sweet, and dark chocolate bars results not only in supremely chocolatey cookies, but cookies with a well-developed, complex flavor.
Lastly, you always have the option to sift through the best and worst chocolate chips on store shelves for brands made with quality ingredients. Then, for supreme flavor and texture, you can fuse both quality chocolate chips and a chopped bar into your next batch of delicious homemade cookies.
