My daughter sent me a recipe for gingerbread biscotti which has macadamia nuts and then dipped in white chocolate. The recipe says to "melt according to the instructions on the bag". Well, there are NO melting instructions on this bag of Ghirardelli White Chocolate Chips. After reading umpteen stories online about the hazards of melting white chocolate, NONE of them mentioned adding cocoa butter. Is it because most people don't have cocoa butter on hand (I use it in my soap making) or is it that it doesn't work?
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1It may be wise to double check the cocoa butter is food-grade if planning to use it this way, I know cosmetic-grade is more commonly sold since more people are planning on using it for soaps, etc. Cosmetic grade products may have been processed with solvents, etc that are... less than digestible– MeghaFeb 12, 2019 at 7:40
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FYI - at least in the US, Ghirardelli white chips are not white chocolate. They contain no cocoa butter.– Debbie M.Feb 12, 2019 at 15:31
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Thank you both for commenting. FYI - the cocoa butter i was going to use is Unrefined Cocoa Butter, so I assumed it was not treated with any chemicals, so therefore safe to use. I just assumed that. I realize that the Ghirardelli white chips are not 'chocolate', but that is what the recipe called for.– Dee SchroederFeb 13, 2019 at 0:14
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2 Answers
White chocolate melts smoothly if there's nothing wrong with it. While I'd sometimes melt milk or dark chocolate in a microwave, for white chocolate I always use a bain marie, heated gently and stirred very gently.
If you try to heat it too fast it will catch and never melt. This can also happen if it's old, or has been stored in fluctuating temperatures.
There's a lot of cocoa butter in white chocolate anyway so adding more wouldn't do much to the melting. It might however be desirable to make the chocolate less sweet.
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Thank you for your answer. I appreciate it. I love to cook so when my daughter sent ME a recipe i was surprised. What got my goose was the fact that I don't do much with white chocolate (with the exception of putting them into scones or cookies) so I was at a loss as to how to melt the chips because there was no set of directions on the package which led me to exploring online sites, which only left me more confused. The idea of adding oil to the chips was a suggestion on one of those sites, but they suggested cooking oil, not cocoa butter. Again, Thank You! Feb 13, 2019 at 0:18
Proper white chocolate chips are almost all cocoa butter anyway, no need to add any more. If you really need pure cocoa butter, you can buy that in chips too. But if you want the formulation of white chocolate (with some milk solids, sugar, vanilla, etc.) that is sold as "white chocolate", then it makes no sense to dilute it with more cocoa butter. Also, if you do that, the final product (after hardening) will have a different texture.
What I suspect you may have read are failed attempts to make liquid-and-white-chocolate mixtures. Just like dark chocolate, if you add too little liquid, you get bad seizing. But unlike dark chocolate, if you add too much liquid, the whole thing won't set at the end the way standard ganache does. Many people are not aware of this, try doing it with arbitrary amounts of liquid, and get bad results. But if you melt the pure chocolate chips over a water bath and don't let anything burn, you shouldn't have a problem.
answered Feb 12, 2019 at 12:49
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1You are exactly right about what I read. Thank you for your input. I have worked with chocolate many times before, mostly in cookies and in the powdered form, and I use chocolate chips and cream in my ganache, which I heat the cream and add the chips to it, and stir like crazy. Amazing. I gather that the Ghirardelli chips are not real chocolate, so I was thinking that perhaps the cocoa butter might be a way to go to add some little bit of flavor and cut the intense sweetness. Again, Thank You! Feb 13, 2019 at 0:23