I’m making my own biscotti. The cookies turn out fine…but I want to dip them in either white or dark chocolate. I bought a bad of Ghirarelli’s white chocolate chips. It appears you have to add butter to the melted chips in order to get dipping consistency. Anybody know the proportions of butter to chips?
Generally speaking, you don’t dip with chocolate chips. Chocolate chips have a stabilizer in them to help them hold shape as chips at high heat, and aren’t meant to be used as dipping chocolate.
What you want, if you’re going to dip things in your chocolate is couverture bars or pastilles - this is higher end chocolate rather than baking chocolate, that you can temper (melt to a high temperature, and then bring back down to a lower temperature to dip with) and use.
And for dipping chocolate, in general, you don’t need to add butter. In fact, I would wonder if it would set up properly if you did (ganache – thick chocolate frosting, is just chocolate with a little cream).
You just melt it with gentle heat (either over a double boiler, or in the microwave on half power) stirring frequently until it is a stirrable, dippable texture. Then go to town.
Chocolate chips aren’t the ideal for dipping but you can use them. I just melt them slowly in the microwave, stir throughly and dip. If you want to try using butter, use about 3 tablespoons to a 12 ounce bag of chips. that’s about the porportion I use for a pourable glossy chocolate icing on cakes.
I’ve got a couple of recipe files in my hard drive, that call for making up some dipping chocolate, using paraffin.
One of them calls for melting together 2 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips with on third cup of grated paraffin.
The other calls for melting together a quarter of a bar of paraffin with eight 1-ounce Hershey bars.
It should be done in a double boiler, of course.