’s Food Unwrapped investigated one of life’s greatest mysteries – why don’t the chocolate chips melt when added to cookies?
In Monday’s instalment, co-host Andrea Oliver and the team went to Preston and visited Peter Whiting co-owner of Beech’s Fine Chocolate, a company which has been making the delicious sweet for more than a century.
Peter placed a variety of dark, milk and white chocolate squares on a tray, and later heated them with a heat gun and the dark cocoa block quickly turned to liquid and spread out.
Meanwhile the bake-stable chips ‘completely melted’ but kept their shape.
Bake-stable chocolate is like all other chocolate in that it contains sugar, cocoa powder and cocoa butter.
However, unlike some shop-bought bars of chocolate it contains less fat, meaning when it is heated it is more likely to hold its shape making it perfect for adding to cakes, biscuits and cookies.
When asked why they were so different, Peter replied: ‘The only difference between all these chocolates is essentially the fat content in there.’
While Andrea and many others were under the impression that dark chocolate was supposedly the healthier choice out of the three, she struggled to hide her shock.
‘So hang on a minute, that’s quite annoying, because we are all under the impression if you are going to eat chocolate go for dark but actually it’s got loads of fat in them,’ she said.
‘It’s a natural fat, not a processed fat, so it’s quite a good fat for you,’ Peter added.
‘It’s all about fat when it comes to melting, the more cocoa butter the faster the chocolate will melt.
‘As for bake stable chocolate, the amount of cocoa butter will vary between products but generally speaking they will have less cocoa butter to keep their structure while baking.’
Food Unwrapped is available to watch on All4.
