Skip to main content
Dessert

Chocolate Chips

Chocolate chips are made by boiling sugar, water, and flavorings, then cooling, cutting, and coating with chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chocolate Chips

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Boil brown sugar, cream of tartar, water, and salt until brittle.

  2. Dissolve baking soda in vanilla and add just before removing from heat.

  3. Pour into a buttered pan and cool by tucking edges toward the center.

  4. While warm, pull the mixture until light and porous.

Shape and finish

  1. Pull out to ½ inch thick and 1½ inches wide, then cut into 2-inch pieces with scissors.

  2. Cool on waxed paper until hard.

  3. Dip in melted chocolate and place on waxed candy paper.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Vanilla + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Provides the bulk of the candy and its sweet, caramel-like flavor.
Baking soda
Releases gas into the hot sugar mixture, making it light and porous when pulled.
Cream of tartar
Acidity that helps keep the sugar smooth and prevents crystallization.

The step that matters

Adding the baking soda. Baking soda must be dissolved in vanilla and added just before removing from heat. Added too early or too long, it reacts and escapes before the candy sets, so the mixture loses the air needed for a light, porous texture.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes