Ice Cream: The right kind of chocolate chips

 Chocolate chips for ice cream (adapted from Dana Cree's recipe):

You don't want to use regular chocolate chips in ice cream, not even mini chips, because they will be hard, flavorless, and waxy in your ice cream. The problem is that chocolate chips are formulated to melt at a relatively high temperature, which means when they are cold, or when your mouth is cold from eating ice cream, the flavor of the chocolate doesn't come through.

You need to lower the melting point of the chocolate by adding coconut oil. It's easy (but a little messy).  You want to use refined coconut oil (look for "expeller-pressed" or "refined" on the jar) so that it does not add coconut flavor to the chocolate. 

Ingredients:

• 16 ounces of good chocolate chips (your choice of white, milk, semi-sweet, or bittersweet)
• 1/4 cup of coconut oil

Steps:

1. Place chocolate chips and coconut oil in a big glass measuring cup. 
2. Place it in the microwave and give it a 20-second blast on high. Stir.  
3. Alternate microwaving in 20-second increments and stirring, and as the chocolate gets close to melting, shorten the microwave times to 10 seconds. 
4. When the chocolate is smooth and shiny, pour it onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet, and spread the chocolate into a fairly thin layer, no thicker than about 1/4 inch (6 mm).  
5. Place in the freezer until hard (at least 2 hours or overnight). 
6. Break the sheet of chocolate up, and keep the big chunks in the freezer while you prepare your work surface.
7. Place a flexible cutting board (if you have one) on the cookie sheet (preferably one with tall sides to help contain any chunks of chocolate that go flying).  Or maybe work in a tall-sided roaster to help contain the chocolate.
8. Take 1-2 chunks of chocolate out of the freezer, place them on the cutting board, and chop them up with a serrated knife.
9. Transfer your chocolate chips into a second container, and keep that in the freezer as well.
10. Repeat the previous two steps until all of the chocolate is processed.

When not being chopped up, the big chunks and the chips should be kept in the freezer, so you will be going in and out of the freezer frequently during this process.

It's messy - chocolate flies everywhere, and any that gets on your hands will melt.   But this amount makes enough very tasty chocolate chips to make at least 3-6 batches of ice cream.  

Added: I wonder if it's possible to make the chocolate chips even more melty, perhaps by adding more coconut oil?  I worry that if I add too much, it will get funky.  But how much is too much?