Chocolate chip
small chunk of chocolate

Chocolate chips or chocolate morsels are small chunks of sweetened chocolate, used as an ingredient in a number of desserts (notably chocolate chip cookies and muffins), in trail mix, and less commonly in some breakfast foods such as pancakes. They are often manufactured as teardrop-shaped volumes with flat circular bases; another variety of chocolate chips has the shape of rectangular or square blocks. They are available in various sizes, usually less than 3⁄8 in (10 mm) in diameter.
Origin
Chocolate chips were created with the invention of chocolate chip cookies in 1938 when Ruth Graves Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in the town of Whitman, Massachusetts, added cut-up chunks of a semi-sweet Nestlé chocolate bar to a cookie recipe. (The Nestlé brand Toll House cookies is named for the inn). The cookies were a huge success, and Wakefield reached an agreement in 1939 with Nestlé to add her recipe to the chocolate bar's packaging in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate. Initially, Nestlé included a small chopping tool with the chocolate bars. In 1941, Nestlé and at least one of its competitors started selling the chocolate in "chip" (or "morsel") form.
Types
Originally, chocolate chips were made of semi-sweet chocolate, but today there are many flavors. These include bittersweet, peanut butter, butterscotch, mint chocolate, white chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white and dark swirled chips.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chocolate chip” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.