Reduced-Fat Chocolate Chips Taste Like Regular Ones

Just when you thought manufacturers had defatted every food short of lard itself, along came Hershey’s with its reduced-fat, semisweet chocolate chips.

Made with Salatrim, a reduced-calorie fat, the skinnier chips have about half the fat of the regular ones - but only after you eat them. That’s because Salatrim is not fully digested and absorbed by the body.

We baked two different doughs - Hershey’s standard chocolate-chip-cookie recipe made with butter and Hershey’s reduced-fat cookie-dough recipe made with a 60-percent-oil spread.

The result? Chip-wise, there wasn’t much difference. In other words, if you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell. Not surprisingly, the differences between the taste and texture of the doughs was much more marked (anything made with a 1/2 pound of butter is bound to be a lot richer).