chocolate chips should not be crispy
November 5, 2021 8:24 PM
Normally I'm a huge fan of this company, but in the last few months I've gotten bags of their chocolate chips where the chips taste grainy and crystallized. I have questions.
Is this because they melted and reformed? The chips are not stuck together as a solid mass anywhere in the bag, which according to Amazon reviews is what happens if they melt and resolidify.
I am not at all a baker, I just like to snack on them. Is there any way to salvage them? Even after lightly melting them the disgusting graininess remains; they are inedible.
I've gotten bags like this from three different stores now and have had to throw them out. These chips are not cheap. I'm too disorganized and time crunched to return them to the store.
If this keeps up I'm going to have to stop buying them, which makes me sad. Could this be something more nefarious or grosser than just "the chocolate melted or froze somewhere along the way"? I'm wondering if it's an issue at the manufacturing source?
I've tried googling this and cannot find anything besides crystallized chocolate recipes and how home cooks can prevent chocolate from seizing.
In many many years of eating chocolate I've never encountered anything that tastes as off as this. It tastes almost like actual fine grained sand.
Is this because they melted and reformed? The chips are not stuck together as a solid mass anywhere in the bag, which according to Amazon reviews is what happens if they melt and resolidify.
I am not at all a baker, I just like to snack on them. Is there any way to salvage them? Even after lightly melting them the disgusting graininess remains; they are inedible.
I've gotten bags like this from three different stores now and have had to throw them out. These chips are not cheap. I'm too disorganized and time crunched to return them to the store.
If this keeps up I'm going to have to stop buying them, which makes me sad. Could this be something more nefarious or grosser than just "the chocolate melted or froze somewhere along the way"? I'm wondering if it's an issue at the manufacturing source?
I've tried googling this and cannot find anything besides crystallized chocolate recipes and how home cooks can prevent chocolate from seizing.
In many many years of eating chocolate I've never encountered anything that tastes as off as this. It tastes almost like actual fine grained sand.
I have not done that, because I always assumed it was the store's fault and not the company's.
posted by ThreeSocksToTheWind at 8:35 PM on November 5, 2021
posted by ThreeSocksToTheWind at 8:35 PM on November 5, 2021
The chocolate-making process is very delicate — small disturbances while the chocolate is solidifying can cause it to form the wrong crystal structure and develop a grainy texture. This can also happen later if the chocolate is exposed to temperature extremes. It could be the fault of either the manufacturer or the retailer.
posted by mekily at 8:42 PM on November 5, 2021
posted by mekily at 8:42 PM on November 5, 2021
Hey I don't know if you bought any of the lilies at a Whole Foods but I do returns over the phone all the time as long as you have your receipt I can get the number off the bottom pull up your receipt and just refund it to the credit card you used.
But yes please contact the company and tell them that they're having a quality standard issue.
posted by markbrendanawitzmissesus at 8:43 PM on November 5, 2021
But yes please contact the company and tell them that they're having a quality standard issue.
posted by markbrendanawitzmissesus at 8:43 PM on November 5, 2021
if you've gotten the bags from different stores it is more likely to be a problem with a factory batch, isn't it? check the lot number if you still have the packaging, and contact the company.
posted by fingersandtoes at 9:53 PM on November 5, 2021
posted by fingersandtoes at 9:53 PM on November 5, 2021
Apologies if this is unhelpful, but I was curious about this on reading your question. One thing I notice is that those seem to be cooking chocolate, and the point of that is that it's supposed to be melted and re-set before it's eaten, because regular chocolate doesn't deal with that process in a nice way. It's entirely possible they reconfigured the recipe recently - for example (a supposition I invented, btw): the chips are labelled gluten free, so they might have taken something out and replaced it with something else to achieve that, which give a pleasing, gluten-free result when cooked but are all grainy when the chips are, as it were, raw.
It wouldn't have to be that, it could be they just reconfigured the recipe to make the product cheaper to manufacture, or something else - they're fiddling with the recipe all the time - the point is that I suspect they're taking the melting-and-setting into account when designing the product, and maybe not considering the possibility that someone might snack on them.
(I worry that this seems judgemental - I used to like cooking chocolate when I was a child, and if my mother had any I wasn't allowed to eat it. I thought at the time it was because it was bad for me uncooked - which might unconsciously be influencing my attempt at an answer - but realise now that it was just more expensive, pound for pound, certainly too expensive to shovel into a child willy nilly, if you have cakes to decorate. This was the 1970s, though, and we're a lot more relaxed these days.)
posted by Grangousier at 3:14 AM on November 6, 2021
It wouldn't have to be that, it could be they just reconfigured the recipe to make the product cheaper to manufacture, or something else - they're fiddling with the recipe all the time - the point is that I suspect they're taking the melting-and-setting into account when designing the product, and maybe not considering the possibility that someone might snack on them.
(I worry that this seems judgemental - I used to like cooking chocolate when I was a child, and if my mother had any I wasn't allowed to eat it. I thought at the time it was because it was bad for me uncooked - which might unconsciously be influencing my attempt at an answer - but realise now that it was just more expensive, pound for pound, certainly too expensive to shovel into a child willy nilly, if you have cakes to decorate. This was the 1970s, though, and we're a lot more relaxed these days.)
posted by Grangousier at 3:14 AM on November 6, 2021
Ingredients: Unsweetened Chocolate, Erythritol, Chicory Root Fiber, Sunflower Lecithin, Vanilla Extract, Stevia Extract
So this isn't properly chocolate, this is some paleo keto diabetic chocolate adjacent science project that's made for people who cannot have digestible sugar for dietary reasons. If you're intentionally avoiding digestible sugar, then I get it, your options are severely limited. I love chocolate, I'm sympathetic to your plight.
The problem here is most likely that pesky erythritol combined with increasingly colder temps. Sugar alcohols can be finicky (and also give you runny poops, so don't overdo it), and I've heard that erythritol in particular is very sensitive to recrystallization.
You very rarely see erythritol in sugar free candies (that's more commonly maltitol or sorbitol)--but you do see it a lot in recipes for like keto brownies and stuff. Maybe it bakes nicer than other sugar alcohols, maybe it plays nicer with fatty flavors like chocolate, that's just a guess, I'm not as informed on this. But the internet is full of people complaining that their erythritol brownies that were so nice the night they made them are crunchy or grainy the next day. Erythritol just doesn't play nice with temperature cooling. It's extremely prone to recrystallization. My bet (again just a guess) is that the weather getting even a little bit cooler as your chocolate is getting passed from warehouse to truck to shelf is enough to trigger some recrystallization.
(By the way, the gluten free label is a red herring, there's no gluten in plain chocolate.)
Depending on your actual needs/wants here you have some options.
If you can eat real chocolate and safely digest sugar, just want to eat less sugar, go get some nice super dark chocolate. (I like snacking on chocolate chips, too, and sometimes I'll smack an 85% dark bar with a hammer and siphon it off into a little dish so I have little pieces. I know I'm a monster don't @ me.) And ghirardelli has some 72% dark chips that are pretty good.
If you can't safely digest sugar, you should look for sugar free chocolate in the aisle with the diabetic candy. I don't know much about these from taste perspective, but they generally have maltitol as the primary sugar alcohol and it's a little more stable.
If you're going for this chocolate because it doesn't have soy lecithin, you'll have to do some research. That's a valid complaint, soy lecithin is in most (but not all) chocolate, and if you can't eat soy that's its own problem.
Either way, definitely let the company know that there's a quality control issue (sorry that's a lecture??), but my guess is that to a certain extent the recrystallization is unavoidable because of that erythritol.
posted by phunniemee at 4:45 AM on November 6, 2021
So this isn't properly chocolate, this is some paleo keto diabetic chocolate adjacent science project that's made for people who cannot have digestible sugar for dietary reasons. If you're intentionally avoiding digestible sugar, then I get it, your options are severely limited. I love chocolate, I'm sympathetic to your plight.
The problem here is most likely that pesky erythritol combined with increasingly colder temps. Sugar alcohols can be finicky (and also give you runny poops, so don't overdo it), and I've heard that erythritol in particular is very sensitive to recrystallization.
You very rarely see erythritol in sugar free candies (that's more commonly maltitol or sorbitol)--but you do see it a lot in recipes for like keto brownies and stuff. Maybe it bakes nicer than other sugar alcohols, maybe it plays nicer with fatty flavors like chocolate, that's just a guess, I'm not as informed on this. But the internet is full of people complaining that their erythritol brownies that were so nice the night they made them are crunchy or grainy the next day. Erythritol just doesn't play nice with temperature cooling. It's extremely prone to recrystallization. My bet (again just a guess) is that the weather getting even a little bit cooler as your chocolate is getting passed from warehouse to truck to shelf is enough to trigger some recrystallization.
(By the way, the gluten free label is a red herring, there's no gluten in plain chocolate.)
Depending on your actual needs/wants here you have some options.
If you can eat real chocolate and safely digest sugar, just want to eat less sugar, go get some nice super dark chocolate. (I like snacking on chocolate chips, too, and sometimes I'll smack an 85% dark bar with a hammer and siphon it off into a little dish so I have little pieces. I know I'm a monster don't @ me.) And ghirardelli has some 72% dark chips that are pretty good.
If you can't safely digest sugar, you should look for sugar free chocolate in the aisle with the diabetic candy. I don't know much about these from taste perspective, but they generally have maltitol as the primary sugar alcohol and it's a little more stable.
If you're going for this chocolate because it doesn't have soy lecithin, you'll have to do some research. That's a valid complaint, soy lecithin is in most (but not all) chocolate, and if you can't eat soy that's its own problem.
Either way, definitely let the company know that there's a quality control issue (sorry that's a lecture??), but my guess is that to a certain extent the recrystallization is unavoidable because of that erythritol.
posted by phunniemee at 4:45 AM on November 6, 2021
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posted by never.was.and.never.will.be. at 8:31 PM on November 5, 2021