National Chocolate Chip Day

What the day is

National Chocolate Chip Day is observed on May 15. The subject is the chip itself rather than the cookie, which has its own days elsewhere on the calendar.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The chip's own origin is unusual: the cookie predates the product. Ruth Wakefield, running the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts in the 1930s, chopped up a bar of semisweet chocolate into a cookie dough. The pieces held their shape rather than melting through, and the result became popular enough that the chocolate manufacturer began scoring its bars for easier chopping, then selling purpose-made morsels.

The industrial chip is engineered for that behavior. It contains less cocoa butter than a bar and often includes stabilizers, which raises the temperature at which it loses structure so it survives the oven with its shape intact. That is a deliberate trade: a chip is designed to hold up, not to melt luxuriously.

Which is why many bakers prefer chopped bar chocolate or flat discs. Chopping produces irregular pieces and fine shards that melt into ribbons through the dough, and the result tastes more of chocolate and less uniform. If you have ever wondered why bakery cookies look different from home ones, this is usually why.

Chips also come in varieties whose names describe sweetness rather than cocoa content, and white chips frequently contain no cocoa butter at all, which makes them a confection rather than chocolate in any legal sense.

How to take part

• Compare chopped bar chocolate against chips in the same recipe. The difference is obvious.
• Check the ingredient list. Cocoa butter should be there; vegetable fat means you are buying coating.
• Rest cookie dough overnight in the refrigerator, which hydrates the flour and deepens flavor considerably.
• Press a few chips onto the tops of the dough balls before baking, which is how bakeries get the look.
• Use chips where they earn their engineering: cookies, muffins, and anything that must not become a puddle.