Posted
on August 4, 2016
Mmm...chocolate!
We
have loads of chocolate things available to us, every day, in our
grocery stores as well as restaurants, bakeries, drugstores,
department stores, and even chocolatiers – special shops that sell
nothing but chocolate!
We're
talking candies, cookies, cakes, pies and other pastries, ice creams
and other frozen treats, even weird treats like chocolate-coated
bacon, pickles, onions, jalapenos, and other items that would seem to
be odd to be coupled with chocolate!
In
addition to all the bajillions of prepared chocolate foods, we can
make our own chocolate treats using bars of unsweetened chocolate,
cocoa powder, or (and this is my favorite) chocolate chips.
What
are chocolate chips? They are small chunks of chocolate, often sold
in flat-bottomed teardrop shapes. The original chocolate chip, sold
by Nestle and at least one competitor in 1941, was semi-sweet
chocolate—and that is the kind of chips I buy 99% of the time.
However, these days chocolate chips come in bittersweet, mint
chocolate, white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate,
white-and-dark swirled, and other flavors as well as the best-selling
semi-sweet chocolate flavor. They are also offered in several sizes. 
 |
| Taste tests give high scores to Trader Joe's brand semi-sweet chocolate chips. |
My
personal two favorite ways to eat chocolate chips are in
chocolate-chip cookies and Trader Joe's ice cream sandwiches, made
from two chocolate chip cookies with vanilla ice cream between; tiny
chocolate chips coat the edge of the ice cream.
Toll
House Cookies
Have
you ever heard chocolate-chip cookies described as “Toll House
cookies”?
Back
in 1937, a woman named Ruth Graves Wakefield was running an inn
called the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. She added cut-up chunks
of a semi-sweet Nestle chocolate bar to her cookie recipe – and her
cookies were wildly successful. A couple of years later, Wakefield
and Nestle made an agreement – her recipe would be added to the
chocolate bar's packaging in exchange for a lifetime supply of free
chocolate bars.
At
that time, Nestle sold the semi-sweet chocolate bars, not just with
the recipe printed on the wrapper, but with a small chopping tool
included! But just a few years after that, the company started
selling the familiar teardrop shaped chips – still with the recipe
on the package, but no chopping tool needed!
Notice that Nestle packaging still has the Toll House connection!
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