The Creation of the Nestle Morsel
In 1939, Nestle made it even easier to bake Toll House cookies with the introduction of the semi-sweet chocolate morsel. Today, Nestle morsels are available in a variety of flavors, such as peanut butter, butterscotch, white chocolate, and mint. Every package of Nestle morsels, whatever the flavor, still bears a picture of the Toll House Inn.
More About Ruth Wakefield
In 1940, Ruth Wakefield wrote a cookbook called “Toll House Tried and True Recipes.” The cookbook was quite popular, and went through 39 printings. She and her husband continued to run the Toll House Inn until 1966. Ruth passed away in 1977 after seeing her cookie recipe printed on millions of packages of Nestle morsels. Sadly, the Toll House burned down in 1984.
Types of chips
Originally, chocolate chips were made of semi-sweet chocolate, but today there are many flavors. These include bittersweet chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, butterscotch chips, mint chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, dark chocolate chips, milk chocolate chips, and white and dark swirled chocolate chips.
Uses
Chocolate chips can be used in cookies, pancakes, waffles, cakes, pudding, muffins, crêpes, pies, hot chocolate, and various types of pastry. They are also found in many other retail food products such as granola bars, ice cream, and trail mix.
Chocolate chips can also be melted and used in sauces and other recipes. The chips melt best at temperatures between 104 and 113 °F (40 and 45 °C). The melting process starts at around 90 °F when the cocoa butter in the chips starts to heat. The cooking temperature must never exceed 115 °F (for milk and white) or 120 °F (for dark) or the chocolate will burn. Although convenient, melted chocolate chips are not always recommended as a substitute for melted baking chocolate. Because most chocolate chips are designed to retain their shape when baking, they contain less cocoa butter than baking chocolate. This can make them more difficult to work with in melted form.
Availability
Today, chocolate chips are very popular as a baking ingredient in the United States and the chocolate chip cookie is regarded as a quintessential American dessert. Chocolate chips are also available in Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world. Nestlé and The Hershey Company are among the top producers of chocolate chips.