The Best Chocolate Bars for Baking

If you only keep one kind of chocolate product on hand for dessert-making emergencies, it should be baking bars. Available in all of the many shades and flavors of chocolate on the market today, baking bars are all-purpose meltable, chopable, and snackable—absolutely worth hoarding in a stack in your pantry for when the need for homemade cookies strikes.

The best chocolate bar for baking depends on what you’re using it for, but most can be swapped in for another to fit your cocoa tastes. Deeply bitter dark chocolate might be just right for a truffle to sink your teeth into, whereas white chocolate chopped into slivers is the perfect mix-in for a bar cookie studded with bits of dried fruit. Regardless of the flavor profile you’re going for (pro tip: Keep an assortment so you never have to settle), bars can do it all. Read on to learn more about why slab-format chocolate is the best, and the appropriate uses for every style. 

Why use baking bars?

Despite their rigid shape, chocolate bars offer a lot of versatility to the home baker. Perhaps the most obvious use is as a substitute for chocolate chips in a cookie recipe, with roughly chopped irregular chunks, slivers, and crumbly bits studding the dough instead. This adds visual and textural interest to your finished bake with chocolate dispersed throughout every bite. If you’re planning to melt or temper chocolate, starting with a bar is a good choice as well. Small pieces melt quickly and evenly over a double boiler or in the microwave. And because store-bought chips and chunks often include stabilizers and other extras, a chopped baking bar yields a smoother and more malleable end result. 

Because you have control over the shape of your chocolate when you chop it up yourself, bars are a great way to stuff doughs or other treats with chocolate, which creates a melty filling in the oven; long, skinny strips or triangles—for croissants or hand pies, for example—are just bit of knife work away. Finally, taking a vegetable peeler or rasp grater to a bar of chocolate is a quick way to create a decorative effect to top a cake or tiramisu, for tiny curls or fine shavings, respectively. 

Semisweet and bittersweet

The hero of a chocolate chip cookie, the champion of buttercream, and the secret to a good ganache is a chocolate that walks the line between sharp and sugary—enjoyable but with just enough bite to add a bit of intrigue. This is semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, two categories that are so similar they can be used interchangeably in recipes to great success.

Semisweet chocolate technically hovers around 60% cacao, while bittersweet approaches 70%; dark (see below) is anything higher that that, though you’ll occasionally see “dark chocolate” labels on products as low as 55%. Luckily, the delightfully balanced effect of either semisweet or bittersweet chocolate on a baked good is about the same. The 60 to 70% range is (no pun intended) the sweet spot for most recipes and most personal tastes as it provides some of the astringency of dark without going whole hog.