In the millennial-old tradition of baking, the classic chocolate chip cookie is a remarkably new invention. The cookie itself was developed around 1937 by a baker at Toll House Inn, when Ruth Graves Wakefield—for all sorts of debatable reasons—first decided to add a chopped chocolate bar to a cookie. They were a hit, and she sold the recipe to Nestlé in 1939. By 1941, Nestlé figured out how to mass-produce chocolate chips, a novel drop of melted chocolate that solidified into a tiny morsel. And the rest is history.
Or is it? Because nearly 80 years later, a Tesla engineer named Remy Labesque teamed up with Todd Masonis, CEO and cofounder of Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco. The team spent three years reimagining a more perfect chocolate chip. And apparently, it’s a flat, polygonal wafer—or perhaps a square that dreams to be a diamond. Dandelion calls these chocolate bites “facets.”
As Masonis is quick to point out, the original chocolate chip design is an artifact of industrialization and mass production, but not necessarily the perfect delivery mechanism for Dandelion’s single origin chocolates, which have subtle floral and fruity notes more along the lines of third wave coffee than a Hershey’s Kiss.
While the small, round shape of chips makes it easy to mix them into batter—and their dense bottoms thwart heat in the oven to retain some of their shape—chocolate chips are a lousy delivery mechanism to tasting chocolate. Any expert will tell you that chocolate is meant to melt on your tongue luxuriously, while a chip pretty much just gets stuck in your fillings by default.
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