I’m a Professional Baker — This Cheap $2 Chocolate from IKEA Is the Best (Especially for Desserts!)

As both a baker and a groceries editor, I spend a lot of time in the baking aisle of my local grocery store. I’m constantly checking out new products and tracking prices — not just for work, but also for my own recipes. More recently, my grocery bills have gone up across the board: eggs, dairy, flour, and, yes, chocolate.

For years experts have warned about a world without chocolate, driven by extreme weather, including droughts and heavy rainfall, which damage crops and reduce yields. That, in turn, has contributed to price increases across all types of chocolate — especially ones used for baking. So I turned to IKEA for its high-quality, delicious, and surprisingly affordable chocolate bars. 

On a furniture run last year, I saw the Choklad Mörk 60% dark chocolate bars by the checkout area and grabbed two just for fun. I had it in the car on the way home, and was so impressed by the slightly sweet, deeply chocolaty flavor and decadent texture. 

The next day I was curious how it would perform in cookies, so I chopped one up and added it to my dough. It melted into the batter like a dream while still holding its shape. The result was perfect.

The best part? The 4-ounce bars are just $1.99 (about 50 cents an ounce), compared with $1.50 to $2 per ounce for other baking chocolates.

I like baking with these bars almost as much as I like eating them. The chocolate is velvety and rich, and that same flavor carries over into a variety of desserts. To bake with them, I chop the bars by hand with a sharp knife and typically weigh the pieces in grams rather than using cups, as the sizes are irregular (a kitchen scale is a must!).

Some recipes call for chocolate chips to save you the trouble of chopping chocolate, but chocolate chips contain stabilizers to help them keep their shape (which is less of an issue in desserts like cookies, but isn’t recommended for ganaches and frostings because they don’t melt as well). 

I prefer using these chopped IKEA bars for it all because they not only melt into satisfying puddles of chocolate that speckle beautifully in cookies and muffins, but also make frostings super soft and velvety with delicious, rich chocolate flavor. These days, anytime I’m by an IKEA I grab at least a dozen bars because the chocolate is just that good. 

Have you tried any of IKEA’s groceries before? Tell us about it in the comments below.