Chocolate Chips – Product Review 008

Finding the best chocolate chip is similar to finding the best color in the rainbo w, or the best season of the year–you can’t go wrong.  It comes down to a matter of preference.

That being said, it certainly wouldn’t be worth the calories, eating  sub-standard chocolate chips. In fact, my passion for chocolate chip cookies helped me gain 40 pounds after I had my first child.

My point is, I love chocolate chips and so I took this seriously.

For testing, I ended up purchasing four different brands of semi-sweet chocolate chips: Guittard, Nestle, Ambrosia, and Kroger brand at Smith’s grocery store.

Best Taste

I had eight children at my house when I was baking the test cookies, and they all chose Nestle brand over Ambrosia.  I think that could partly be because Ambrosia has a darker chocolate taste where as Nestle is more mellow.  A mother of two of the children chose Ambrosia, saying she loved dark chocolate and it had more chocolate taste.

Since Nestle is generally liked in my household, I had my family choose between Nestle, Guittard, and Kroger for the best taste.  It surprised me that they had a hard time telling the difference.   They liked all of them equally.  Even tasting them separately, I couldn’t tell the difference between the three kinds.

So I don’t have a solid winner for taste.  If you like a stronger chocolate taste, Ambrosia is best; for a mellower semi-sweet, my opinion was that they were about equal. That is hard for me to say, being a chocolate snob, but I will just qualify by saying, other grocery store brands may not be as good as Kroger, so make sure you do your own taste test before switching over.

Best Price

Courtesy of Costco.com

Buying chocolate chips in bulk are definitely the best deal, as long as you don’t mind storing them.  My Costco carries Ambrosia in a 10 lb. bag  and Nestle in a 72 oz. bag.  The Nestle ends up being $2.23 a lb. and Ambrosia $1.90 a lb.  At the Smith’s grocery store, I figured out that Guittard was $3.98 a pound and Kroger’s was $2.63 a pound, but you can only buy them in 12 oz. packages.

If anyone knows of a better place to buy chocolate chips in bulk, please, let me know (my email address is at the bottom of the page).  Just make sure that they taste good enough to be worth the guilt.

Myself? I will probably keep buying the Nestle Chocolate Morsels that I’ve been getting all along—I’ll just try to make them as rarely as I can.

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe (carefully honed over the last 20 years and used for all my taste tests):

2 sticks of butter, softened

1 cup shortening

2 cups brown sugar

1 ½ cups white sugar

Mix together and blend again after adding:

3 eggs

2 tsps vanilla

Combine in separate bowl:

1 ½ tsp salt

1 ½ tsp baking soda

5 cups of flour

Slowly add to wet mixture while mixing.  Add in 1 more cup of flour in stages if dough seems too wet.

Add up to 4 cups of chocolate chips, according to preference

Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

If you have any questions or comments, email me at stephanie@houseoforder.com

~Stephanie