Anonymous wrote:You probably just remember buying white baking chips labeled as white chocolate chips before they tightened up the food labeling laws.

Ding ding ding.

We have a winner.

Anonymous wrote:I thought white chocolate has no cocoa in it.

It doesn’t, but it has cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is kind of a pain - it doesn’t recrystallize easily after you melt it. If you’ve ever had a chocolate bar melt and then reform into a crumbly, gray mess, that’s what I’m talking about. So lots of products like baking chips are made with cocoa solids mixed with a more cooperative, cheap fat like palm oil.

There are genuine upsides. Like if you want to dip something in chocolate and have it be shiny and snappy when it cools, you have to temper the chocolate (heat it to a specific temp range, then cool it in a very specific way and/or “seed” it with chunks of tempered chocolate to get the fat to crystallize right). If you use “melting chips” or something like that with a different fat, it’s much easier to get a good result.