Someone From Tesla Redesigned the Chocolate Chip
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Remy Labesque, an industrial designer for Tesla, has reimagined the chocolate chip for San Francisco-based Dandelion Chocolate.
In a blog post, the company describes the new design as "the perfect chocolate chip."
Dandelion Chocolate lauds the chips for their velvety mouthfeel.
When you combine the words "Tesla" and "chip," you probably conjure up images of silicon-based computer chips. But one Tesla employee has a different kind of chip in mind: the chocolate kind.
Remy Labesque, a Los Angeles-based industrial designer for Tesla, has been cooking up the blueprint for the "perfect" chocolate chip over the last three years. After attending a Chocolate 101 class at Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco, Labesque struck up a relationship with the company.
For the past few decades, the chocolatier relied on an in-house kitchen team to hand-pipe over 50 pounds of tempered chocolate chips each week, according to a blog post. Since May, Dandelion has been using Labesque's creation, which is known as the Large Chip.
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Labesque developed both large and small chips, but Dandelion won't release the little ones until a later date. He worked closely with Lisa Vega, the head pastry chef, to come up with the perfect mass for each: 3.5 grams and 0.8 grams, respectively. But the duo wanted to create a confection that could stand up on its own as a treat—and that meant reconfiguring the shape of the chocolate chip altogether.
"The shape of a typical store-bought chocolate chip is an arbitrary result of the industrial manufacturing process used to make it," Labesque explains in the blog post. "As you might expect, a drop of molten chocolate is deposited onto a flat surface and left to cool. Chocolate chip taste varies widely by brand, but the shape of the chips does not."
Dandelion's new chips are faceted, meaning the edges of each chip taper to acutely thin points, but without compromising structure. Labesque says that's intentional, because the thermal mass of a thin piece of chocolate allows it to melt more quickly, creating a luxurious mouthfeel.
As for the shape, they're not quite a diamond, not quite a square, and not quite a hexagon. They sort of look like a squished Dreidel, but with sharper edges.
Want to snag your own? A 5.5-pound bag costs $100, while a 17.6-ounce bag will run you about $30. Maybe that's a bit much, but then again, that would make the cocoa morsels the Tesla of chocolate chips.
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