LPT: Chocolate chips are candy.

Submitted by CrazieCayutLayDee t3_11ayqv5 in LifeProTips

Distressed over the price of your favorite chocolate candy? Head to the baking aisle. Chocolate chips come in all sorts of flavors and some are made by higher quality mass market chocolatiers like Ghirardelli. Sometimes, especially around the holidays, the baking aisle will also have mini peanut butter cups or Twix chips as well. Comparing a 10.5 oz bag of M&Ms and an 11 oz bag of milk chocolate chips, the store brand pure milk chocolate chips are about half the price of the M&Ms per ounce and taste great. Just think of them as mini Hershey's kisses.

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keepthetips t1_j9uu8o3 wrote

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gargle_ground_glass t1_j9uwrgf wrote

I think a better tip would be that now that chocolate candy is unaffordable it's a great opportunity to wean yourself off of candy dependency.

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ledow t1_j9vdlit wrote

I'm a single guy, not very good at cooking, but when I was down on money the last few years I started buying weird random things to see what they were like in case it was something I enjoyed and could save money on.

Just before Christmas 2021 I went to my local supermarket.

To "make room" on the shelves for Christmas stock, they had put a ton of "baking chocolate" bars in the reduced aisle. I mean, dozens upon dozens upon dozens, filling entire shelves, in plain (but factory-sealed) wrapping, for pennies each.

I picked one up and felt it, and it felt like a chocolate bar inside. Cut squares and everything. I read the ingredients and compared it to a chocolate bar I had in my basket. Almost identical. The expiry dates were something like a year from that point (i.e. Christmas 2022).

I bought 10, I think they were 750g each. I thought, what the hell, they're really cheap and I'll try it and the worst that happens is that I have a lot of hot chocolate or chocolate cake to make.

I should have bought them all. They were basically just a milk chocolate bar. Tasted identical to any other.

I was tempted to go back just to fill up a basket with whatever they had left, but I thought that it was just being greedy.

My best finds over the past few years were that chocolate, powdered egg (I love scrambled egg and it makes perfect scrambled egg, and I hate things that go off quickly and powdered eggs lasts for YEARS. and you can get a huge 1kg bag of it for almost nothing), burying eggs in salt (they last for MONTHS without refrigeration, it's the air getting to them that makes them go off), salted preserved fish (lasts for years without refrigeration) and a particular brisket-in-a-bag (fabulous tender cut of meat, in a sealed plastic bag, that can be frozen and also lasts 2 months in the fridge so long as you don't open it).

Also, snapping up the "pancake mix" bottles after Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday) - it's just the ingredients but it's a lovely quick meal that only needs water and the bottle of ingredients - chocolates after Valentine's and Easter eggs after Easter.

I also started doing the "world foods" aisles as they often have things in there that I end up liking or that I hadn't considered eating or preserve better, even if the "world food" part is rather contrived.

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TootsNYC t1_j9yjkod wrote

No it’s even better? Chocolate chips are semisweet chocolate! Semisweet is the perfect ratio; milk chocolate is to sweet, and dark chocolate is too sharp. I have searched and searched and never really found a good semisweet chocolate bar.

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FandomMenace t1_j9ylnph wrote

LPT: the saturated fat in chocolate is deleterious to your cardiovascular health, despite all these claims that chocolate is a health food. Skip the calories and saturated fat and go for cocoa powder instead.

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kd-05 t1_j9ypt7t wrote

I personally would not consider Ghirardelli high quality considering their chocolate typically contains high fructose corn syrup. But I guess you did say mass market. I do sneak a caramel filled chocolate of theirs every now and then.

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cyberdeath666 t1_j9z3bam wrote

Yes, because when I want peanut m&ms, chocolate chips are going to do the job…get outta here.

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