Perfectly Melted Chocolate Chips
Today’s post is all about how to melt chocolate chips in the microwave. While this certainly isn’t top-notch chocolatier advice, it’s still important information for all bakers to know. It’s very easy to overheat chocolate when melting, so knowing when to keep going and when to stop is key! This method is typically used when you need melted chocolate as an ingredient for another recipe, like for stirring into my favorite chocolate frosting recipe or melting with butter to make my brownies. It can also be used for dipping or coating though, like you would with tempered chocolate. Before we get started on this quick and easy how-to, I want to make it clear that melting chocolate and tempering chocolate are not the same thing. If you’d like to know more about tempering chocolate, I explain my easy process for this in detail in my hot chocolate bombs and peanut butter balls posts. Essentially though, chocolate chips melted the way I’m sharing today will still melt and coat just fine, but they won’t set quite as smooth and shiny as tempered chocolate would. Tempering chocolate is much more fussy, so I don’t use it as often as I use this technique.
What You Need
Melting chocolate chips in the microwave is easy. All you need is a spoon, a heatproof bowl and:
Chocolate! This method will work for chocolate chips of any variety (including white chocolate and butterscotch chips). It will also of course work with chocolate bars; just chop them before melting.
That’s it! I don’t add anything else to my chocolate chips when melting, unless I need to thin out my chocolate for drizzling (more on that below). SAM’S TIP: Make sure your bowl is completely clean and dry! Even a tiny bit of water can cause your chocolate to seize (meaning become grainy/unusable). Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!
How to Melt Chocolate Chips
SAM’S TIP: As a general rule of thumb, always heat chocolate slowly. Heating too quickly or too much will cause your chocolate to become overheated. Overheated chocolate will be thick, lumpy, and very dull looking. Unfortunately, overheating is hard to come back from (I typically just toss my chocolate and start over when it happens). Sometimes you can salvage overheated chocolate by stirring in vegetable oil, adding more solid chocolate, or pouring your melted chocolate through a strainer. I love to use this technique when I want to quickly dip cookies in chocolate (like my butter cookies), make a low-fuss batch of chocolate covered strawberries, or just want some chocolate for drizzling over cookie bars. Enjoy! Let’s bake together! I’ll be walking you through all the steps in my written recipe and video below! If you try this recipe, be sure to tag me on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube and Facebook
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