Why Your Cookies Deserve A Dose Of Unsweetened Chocolate

Chocolate chip cookies are probably one of the most common methods for delivering chocolate to your taste buds and are typically made with sweetened chocolate, like semisweet, bittersweet, or milk chocolate chips. However, in order to highlight the earthy, bitter taste of chocolate rather than the simple sweetness of sugar, you should also consider adding unsweetened chocolate. 

Incorporating unsweetened chocolate into your chocolate chip cookie recipe will create a new layer of flavor in your cookies which may be slightly different depending on what type of chocolate you use. For example, you could get unsweetened chocolate with more smoky, fruity, or even spicy notes. This is because, unlike dark chocolate, unsweetened chocolate doesn't have any added sugar so the taste is that of pure cacao. Don't worry — your cookies will still be plenty sweet from the sugar you'll add to the recipe. It's very simple to include unsweetened chocolate in your cookies, so there's no harm in trying it out so you can experience the difference yourself.

Once you have your preferred chocolate chip cookie recipe, all you need is some unsweetened chocolate. Look for a bar of the stuff rather than powder or chips so you can customize the size of your chocolate chunks. You should be able to find unsweetened chocolate at most grocery stores, but if you're having trouble you can always buy it from online retailers like Amazon.

Including unsweetened chocolate in a recipe just takes some simple math. In general, you'll want a little less than half of the total chocolate to be unsweetened. So if a recipe calls for 16 ounces of chocolate chips, nine or 10 of those ounces should be normal chocolate chips and the rest unsweetened chocolate chunks. Of course, once you get an idea of what the final result will taste like, you can add more or less unsweetened chocolate until you are satisfied.

Enjoying chocolate can be a slippery slope. Adding a little bit of unsweetened chocolate to your cookies may lead you to get rid of the sweetened chips entirely. So chocoholics beware: Once you've experienced the depth of flavor unsweetened chocolate can bring to cookies, there's no going back.