Which Are Best for Cookies?

Gooey and rich with butter and brown sugar, chocolate chip cookies are one of the most classic desserts in a home baker’s arsenal. You might’ve noticed, however, that some recipes don’t call for chocolate chips at all, but rather some form of chopped chocolate. So if you have only one type of chocolate on hand, could that ruin your bake? And is one “better” than the other for an ideal cookie?

Here’s a breakdown of chocolate chips versus chocolate chunks in cookies, brownies, and beyond. 

A brief history of chocolate chips

Baker Ruth Wakefield is widely credited as the inventor of the modern chocolate chip cookie. According to Nestlé, Wakefield, who ran the Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, first added chopped chocolate to a cookie recipe in 1939 and was surprised that the morsels kept their shape instead of creating a chocolate-flavored cookie. Wakefield published the recipe for Toll House Chocolate Crunch cookies in a Boston newspaper, and that same year gave the rights for the name and recipe to Nestlé. (Wakefield said she was never paid the price of $1 but was reportedly given free chocolate for life.) 

In the 1940s, Nestlé and other companies started manufacturing morsels with ingredients like soy lecithin to help them further hold their shape. 

Today, like chocolate bars, chips come in different varieties, which are differentiated by how much chocolate “liquor” or chocolate mass they contain in comparison to the cocoa butter, sugar, milk solids, and other ingredients therein.

A white chocolate chip, for example, has 0% chocolate mass, while an unsweetened chocolate chip has close to 100%. In addition to using stabilizers like soy lecithin, chip manufacturers typically decrease the percentage of cocoa butter to help them preserve that iconic shape.

Chocolate chunks are a more rustic version of those perfectly shaped chips. They can be created by roughly chopping your favorite chocolate bar. (You might find pre-chopped chocolate chunks in the baking aisle, but note that these behave more similarly to chocolate chips.) To easily chop chocolate, Food & Wine senior recipe developer Tricia Studeman recommends using a large serrated knife, aka a bread knife. 

Should you use chocolate chips or chocolate chunks?

If a recipe calls for chocolate chips, can you swap in chopped chocolate? “The short answer is they are interchangeable,” says pastry chef Elissa Narow, the research and development chef for Eli’s Cheesecake in Chicago. “However, chunks are typically better-quality chocolate, [whereas] chips are specifically made to retain their shape.”

Narow prefers chunks for most recipes “as they provide an alternate shape,” she continues. “I also defer to quality and flavor first.”

For Studeman, “It depends on what you’re making. If you are baking something where you need the chocolate to keep its shape, chocolate chips — which include stabilizers that help them to keep their shape when heated — are probably what you want. If you want your chocolate to melt very smoothly or create dramatic, rustic pools, chopped chocolate is the way to go.” 

She adds that while you can use either for cookies, you should be prepared for the type of chocolate to affect the spread and the overall recipe. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — you’ll still get a delicious cookie — but something to keep in mind if you care about nailing the exact recipe.

Can’t decide between chips and chunks? Opt for both, as in Jasmine Smith’s Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies.

You might opt to use miniature chocolate chips for recipes like cakes, brownies, or breads if you don’t want the chocolate to sink to the bottom. Narow notes that Eli’s popular chocolate chip cheesecake utilizes mini chocolate chips for that reason.

For drizzling or dipping, Studeman says to go for a chocolate bar, finely chopped, as the stabilizers in chocolate chips will prevent them from melting smoothly. Think fondue or chocolate-dipped cookies.