Making sugar-free chocolate chips is surprisingly easy and takes only simple 5 ingredients. Make these homemade chocolate chips for a great low carb and dairy-free option! Great in all your keto cookies, cakes, and sweet treats. Instructional video included.
If you think you might have seen these before, you have. I’ve done homemade sugar-free chocolate chips before, but this version is better and holds up to all of your low carb baking. They hold their shape perfectly and they have a deep rich semi-sweet chocolate flavor. And they honestly take only a few minutes to whip up.
While there are several good brands of sugar-free chocolate chips on the market, they can be prohibitively expensive. I love Lily’s chocolate chips but I find myself balking at $7.49 a bag. They also aren’t dairy-free and they contain a little soy, which many people don’t like. As a reader recently asked me about whether I had a decent homemade alternative, I decided I had to take matters into my own hands. I can honestly say that I have made vast strides in low carb cooking and baking in the past few years and very often my experiments lead me to new discoveries about how certain ingredients behave. I find myself storing up these little tidbits in my brain for future use. And when the time is right, a whole new idea takes shape in my brain and I can hardly wait to test it out.
How to Make Sugar-Free Chocolate Chips
The last time I made chocolate chips, I made them with butter. They were good, to be sure, but definitely a little on the soft side and they needed to be stored in the fridge and then added to the recipe just prior to baking. And although delicious, they didn’t quite live up to that true chocolate-chip flavour I had in my mind. Still, they were a good approximation and I was satisfied. But since that time, I have been playing around with other ingredients in some recipes, including cocoa butter. Unlike butter or coconut oil, cocoa butter stays solid at room temperature and it takes a fair bit of work to make it melt. For a bar of chocolate or a chocolate chip, this is an excellent quality indeed.
I also made sure to thoroughly sift both the powdered Swerve and cocoa powder before adding it to the melted chocolate mixture. This made a significant difference to the end result and the chips were much less grainy. To really sift out all the lumps, simply set a bowl below a fine mesh sieve. Measure your sweetener or cocoa powder into the bowl and use a spoon to stir it around and scrape it through the holes in the sieve.
And now that someone has come along and invented chocolate chip molds, we can even make them chocolate chip shaped! Wooohooo! Heretofore, I had always simply poured the chocolate mixture into chocolate bar molds and then chopped them, making them into low carb chocolate chunks rather than chips. I have also use these honeycomb silicon trivets, which work well and give them a very distinct shape. You can even simply pour the whole mixture into a parchment lined pan and chop them up from there. But obviously the chip mold is fun to have and they look just like the real thing.
Any way you make them, these sugar-free chocolate chips were a huge success. They blew my original attempts out of the water. First, they firmed up perfectly and I found that they didn’t need to be refrigerated after the initial chilling to stay firm. Secondly, they tasted like REAL chocolate. And why shouldn’t they? REAL chocolate is made with cocoa butter and is part of what gives it the deep, intense chocolate flavour. I had a hard time saving any of my first batch for baking with, because I just kept eating a little handful here and a little handful there as I passed through the kitchen.
And these homemade sugar free chocolate chips bake well too, I am pleased to say. I added them to some brownies, and I also baked them up in my Keto Double Chocolate Muffins. They held their shape nicely and didn’t totally liquify and run all over the pan, as I feared they might. They certainly held up about as well as any bar of chopped dark chocolate I’ve ever used.
The low carb chocolate chips melt perfectly into sugar free desserts like my keto chocolate chip cookies and Chocolate Chip Cloud Cookies, and I bet they would be delicious in Kalyn’s flourless low sugar peanut butter chocolate cookies too.
Tips for homemade chocolate chips
- Melt the cocoa butter and unsweetened chocolate in a double boiler. If they are over direct heat, they are more likely to seize.
- Use quality unsweetened chocolate such as Ghirardelli or Scharffenberger. Cheap bakers chocolate tends to seize more and will have a grittier texture.
- Sift your powdered sweetener and your cocoa powder to get out all the lumps.
- Use chocolate chip molds, silicone trivets, or any chocolate mold to shape your chocolate. Be sure to refrigerate until completely firm. After that, they won’t need to stay in the freezer or the fridge.
Sugar-Free Chocolate Chips
Ingredients
- 3 oz cocoa butter
- 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped
- ½ cup powdered Swerve Sweetener , sifted
- 2/3 cup cocoa powder
- ½ tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
- In a heavy saucepan over low heat, melt the cocoa butter and chocolate together until smooth.
- Stir in the sifted powdered erythritol, then stir in the cocoa powder, until smooth. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla extract.
- Pour into chocolate molds or spread in an 8x8 pan lined with parchment paper.
- Refrigerate until set, then remove from the molds or chop into small chunks.
Video
Nutrition
Supplies Needed to Make your own Chocolate Chips
Nutritional Disclaimer
Please note that I am not a medical or nutritional professional. I am simply recounting and sharing my own experiences on this blog. Nothing I express here should be taken as medical advice and you should consult with your doctor before starting any diet or exercise program. I provide nutritional information for my recipes simply as a courtesy to my readers. It is calculated using MacGourmet software and I remove erythritol from the final carb count and net carb count, as it does not affect my own blood glucose levels. I do my best to be as accurate as possible but you should independently calculate nutritional information on your own before relying on them. I expressly disclaim any and all liability of any kind with respect to any act or omission wholly or in part in reliance on anything contained in this website.
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Awesome chocolate chips! Just made them exactly like your recipe and they are so much better than store bought or Lily’s. THank you so much for this recipe!????
I’m so glad I finally tried this recipe! I like Lily’s too, but they are expensive and the prebiotic inulin in them means I have to use them sparingly or I really suffer later. I even ordered the chip mold and some bar molds from Amazon! I can’t wait to try them, they should arrive today. This morning I made a batch using an 8×8 pan and I can’t wait to have some homemade chocolate for dessert.
After buying high quality ingredients is it really that much cheaper to make your own?
Love your site and everything I’ve made from it. Going to make your revised version as soon as my molds arrive. I will be using the higher grade cocoa powder. Can’t wait. Tired of looking for or ordering Lily’s.
Wish the comments were organized with newest ones first, especially since you changed and improved your recipe.
Keep up the good work. I have all your books and love them. Thanks for all you do.
All I can say is I have had fun making two batches already! Thanks so much! Also a nice small snack when all I want is a little bit of chocolate, I just grab a few chips and am so happy! Now I do not have to be concerned when I cannot find Lily’s locally. Matter of fact, will be making my own from now on. Add to my LC ice cream as well!!!!!!! Thank you SO much for discovering how to make things from items I already have in my pantry! P.s. Just bought your new dessert cookbook, can’t wait to see it!
I just have one question. How many of the chocolate chip molds does it take to use the entire batch of chocolate? 9? I topped your peanut butter cups with it (24 minis) and still filled the 3 molds I bought. This recipe makes some serious chocolate chips! It tastes wonderful, a true semi sweet chocolate chip taste. They are setting up as I type this and I will definitely have to store in the fridge since I live in the hot, humid south but I can’t wait to make low carb, keto friendly chocolate chip scones and cookies with them!
I have been making this fantastic recipe for many years. Thank you for the new tips! Hoping you will discover a white chocolate chip recipe on another one of your adventures developing something else!
If you have a 99 cents Only store, they have the silicone trivets very often. Square and Round.
This recipe is worth the “excuse” to buy those chocolate chip molds. SOO cute.
They really are cute! 🙂
Back when I worked for a cooking school, I got spoiled by the super high quality chocolate that we used. It kills me to spend the amount of money for Lily’s, which is good chocolate, but not as good as the chocolate they used in the cooking school. They used Valhrona and Callebaut. I also like Godiva. Scharffenberger’s is pretty good, but not as good as it was before Hershey’s bought the company. I can’t wait to try this recipe with those super high quality chocolates. I haven’t done the math, but it likely means the chips won’t be much cheaper than Lily’s, but one thing I learned from the pro chefs is that high quality ingredients are worth the additional cost, so you should always spring for the highest quality you can afford.
I was thinking the same thing about ingredient costs. To make these chips, you would spend as much or more on ingredients, as the cost of just buying the chips premade. These ingredients dare just costly, no getting around it!
Actually, you wouldn’t. Because each bag of the ingredients to make the chips holds more than you need per batch so you could get several batches out of them.
Such a good idea; I’d love these in a low-carb cookie!
Hi, Do you have a recipe for Homemade Sugar-Free White Chocolate??
I couldn’t find unsweetened chocolate in Australia so I added more cocoa butter and cocoa powder (1 oz of each). Delicious! I don’t mind the graininess at all and added a bit of dedicated coconut to mask it! Even my husband who hates dark chocolate likes this one and 20g (85 cals) is enough to satisfy my sweet tooth after dinner. Can’t wait to try making different flavours by adding different things to it.
Great adaptation!
Wow! Not sure I would’ve ever thought to make my own chocolate chips but these sound awesome!
This is too cool! Love it!
One more question- with nut allergies I think Bakers and Hershey’s are my only options for the unsweetened chocolate. Would Hershey’s be a good enough option? Thanks!
Are you sure others are not nut-free? Ghirardelli? Scharffenberger? They are better quality.
Unfortunately Ghirardelli has a facility with potential for cross contamination with nuts. (Chocolate is one of the trickiest foods for a nut allergy! So many cross contamination labels!) Guittard isn’t safe either. Thanks for the Scharffenberger recommendation- I emailed them to see. I’m hoping that since they’re a part of the Hershey company, that no warning label will mean good news. Hershey’s is fabulous about putting warnings on labels. (The only size Hershey bar that is safe is the regular size not jumbo or mini! But that’s not Keto and thus I’m learning to make chocolate from you!!) Thanks Carolyn! I’ll report back in!
Ah, okay good to know! Trying to think of others.