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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Are the ounces in this recipe volume or weight?
Thanks!
Is it possible to use just cocoa butter and bar baking chocolate instead of adding the powdered chocolate as well?
It doesn’t thicken enough.
I LOVE these! I swap the cocoa and swerve amounts so they are less bitter and more sweet. (1/2 cup cocoa and 2/3 cup powdered swerve). I roll them thin between parchment paper. After being in the frig for 10 minutes i score/cut them into tiny squares. Back into the frig for 20 minutes. They are then very manageable to break up and store. Thanks so much for this awesome recipe!
I’m so happy!!
Lily’s chips DO NOT agree with my GI track and I thought I’d have to give up chocolate. Joy! Joy!
This may be a dumb question, but you list 3 oz. cocoa butter and 2 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped. Are these amounts by weight or by volume?
Thanks!
Weight.
Hi, a couple of questions… Why cocoa butter and cocoa powder AND unsweetened chocolate? I’m no expert but that seems a little redundant.
Also, do these turn out just like Lilys? I find Lilys don’t have quite the same texture as regular chocolate chips. They are a bit crunchier and go back to that state when they are cooled after baking (not quite as crunchy but more so than regular ones.
I was thinking of trying allulose and swerve combined. I wonder if that might solve the texture issue.
Why? Because it works. I experimented a lot on this. No, it’s not redundant, it simply works. They are darker than Lily’s in flavour and colour.
My husband, who is not low carb, says your sugar free chocolate beats the pants off Lilly’s
That’s a lovely compliment!
Thanks for the recipe: I’ve been trying to make chocolate bars with unsweetened chocolate and can’t get the bitter taste out of it. I can’t use any of the alcohol sweeteners, because they just don’t agree with me. so I tried just straight monk fruit powder and stevia, no matter how much I kept adding I could not get rid of the bitterness, lessened it somewhat, but not quite enough for my taste. I’ll try it using the cocoa butter and powder in this recipe. I usually keep reg chocolate cookies on hand for my friend but when I get a craving for chocolate I cheat. lol not too often. However, even once makes me feel guilty.
Hi! I haven’t made these yet because I haven’t purchased the cocoa butter. I was wondering if you think powdered erythritol will work. I feel like I’m going broke ordering all these expensive things for low carb, so I was wondering if these homemade chips are saving any money versus buying a bag of Lily’s? What do you think with your experience in baking and doing it all low carb? Thank you! 🙂
They save about a dollar per bag. And yes, keto baking is expensive. Pick and choose a few recipes that you may really want to try and get the ingredients for those. Then you will find that you have enough ingredients for a few others as well and you can stretch it out a bit.
These work a dream! No seizing, no clumping, no fuss 🙂 The only fussy bit was getting the chips out of the mould, but it’s all good fun messing around with this on a Sunday afternoon. I made some into chocolate chips (I only have 3 of those clever little silicone chip moulds) and some into bars that I chopped up after, and it made a lovely stash of dark chocolate chips (335g… I measured!) that I can’t wait to use in low carb cookies, muffins, and bars. Thank you so much for this, I’ve been wanting to make these for ages and so glad I finally got around to it 🙂
Thanks for this recipe. I have a hard time paying for a bag of Lily’s. I ordered the chocolate chip molds and they just arrived, so I’m excited to try these. I did read that if you tap the mold on the counter a few times after filling it, you can avoid having little dents/air bubbles in the top of the chocolate chips. 🙂
I use this recipe again and again! Thanks!
Hi Carolyn! I read through most of the comments but wondered if you had any experience or understanding that would help me – I want to make something more akin to milk chocolate. I have heavy cream powder. Could I add that to your recipe and turn it into a milkier chocolate instead of dark? I really miss my milk chocolate! Also, do you know if I used a small amount of liquid stevia or monkfruit extract if that would work? How much would you suggest? I plan to trial some of these, but wondered if you had any words of wisdom that might guide! Thanks!
Hi Carolyn, Thank you so much for all of your keto advice and ideas. Do you have any experience using cacao nibs? I saw them at Whole Foods and thought they might be a substitute for the unsweetened chocolate. Do you know? And/or do you use cacao nibs for anything else?
Thanks!
Okay so cacao nibs are not a great chocolate sub. They are very crunchy. Good and a light chocolate flavour but they aren’t something you’d want to try to sub for chocolate. They are good in cakes and bars, though.
I am wondering if you ever figured out what the price differential of your home-made SF chocolate chips vs Lily’s brand is?
Depending on what cocoa butter you purchase, mine is about 25% less expensive.
Perfect recipe! Thank you Carolyn! Your always my-go-to girl for recipes (:
Glad to hear it!