Sara Perry - Deep Dark Chocolate

DECADENT RECIPES
for the serious
CHOCOLATE LOVER

by
SARA PERRY
photographs by
FRANCE RUFFENACH

To my friends and colleagues Amy Treadwell, Jane Zwinger, Kathlyn Meskel, and Karen Brooks. Your support, insights, and ways around the kitchen (and a paragraph) make me shine.

Thanks go to the many chefs and cooks I have interviewed over the years for my weekly Oregonian column, especially Jim Roberts, Jeanne Subotnick, Christopher Israel, Lisa Allen, Dominique Guelin, Gerry Frank, Evelyn Franz, Ken Forkish, Wednesday Wild, Aubrey Lindley, and Jesse Manis. Also to those friends and colleagues who generously shared their ideas, expertise, time, and recipes, especially Martha Holmberg, Matthew Meskel, Kieran Murphy, and Kristi and Chris Preston. To Karen Kirtley, for her excellent work on the early stages of this manuscript, and to copy editor Carrie Bradley for her suggestions and attention to detail. Thanks, Carrie. A special thanks goes to Frankie Whitman of Scharffen Berger Chocolate Makers for generous provisions of chocolate for testing. And, as always, my deepest thanks go to Bill LeBlond, senior editor at Chronicle Books, for his friendship, his great ideas, and the opportunity to do what I love.

Cmon in. Yes, you. This is the placeand the bookto indulge those deep, dark chocolate dreams of the perfect fudge sauce, a big ol chocolate cake piled high with thick, rich frosting, and a luscious, deep, dark chocolate ice cream. Whats even better is that you can make them all by yourself for fun, work, a romantic dinner, your next wedding (hey, these are modern times)or, go ahead, make one just for yourself.

Dark chocolate is more than the quintessential comfort food. It is the new coffee: an affordable daily luxury with its own menu of intensities, flavors, and special infusions. Like fine wines, too, premium dark chocolates have distinctive characteristics. The artful labels that catch your eye are helpful guides to the origin of the cocoa beans, the cocoa-solids percentage, and the chocolates particular flavor profile. If youre confused by words such as cacao and criollo or by percentages that resemble grades on a homework assignment, the Know Your Chocolate section is here to help you understand the terms. Recipe by recipe, Deep Dark Chocolate helps you choose the best dark chocolates for baking, cooking, and eating out of hand.

If you plan your day right, you can kick it off with Hot Chocolate Waffles with Chocolate-Hazelnut Spread, then look forward to a mid-morning break with a slice of One-Bite-to-Heaven Chocolate Yeast Cake or a Chocolate Dream Scone with Mascarpone Spread. To top it off, I wouldnt refuse a nice chunk of Bittersweet Caramel Honeycomb or an espresso cup steaming with European-Style Drinking Chocolate.

As for chocolate cookies, snacks, and bittersweet candies, consider these words attributed to seventeenth-century French aristocrat Madame de Svign: If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! My dear, how will you ever manage? All the more reason to double the batch of Chocolate Cookies with All the Chips and to pass around a plateful of Good Ol Fudgy Brownies.

Youre right to assume no birthday could be properly celebrated without a fabulous dark chocolate birthday cake, four layers high with two kinds of chocolate frosting and candleholders made ofyou guessed itdark chocolate truffles or fudge. Your kids will delight over Some More Smore Pie, Please, and Full-Tilt Dark Chocolate with Zabaglione will have dinner guests asking for more (as well as asking for the recipe).

Dark-chocolate lovers have always known that their favorite food adds shadowy richness, earthy fragrance, and elegant nuance to show-stopping desserts as well as everyday comfort food. Dark chocolate goes to the essence of what chocolate is because dark chocolate has a wealth of cocoa solids, and these give chocolate its flavor and color. Dark chocolate also contains cocoa butter, which carries that wonderful flavor to our taste buds and makes it linger. As a bonus, premium dark chocolate has mystery. Its intense and snappy. Brilliantly fruity. Slightly tart. Have no doubt about it, chocolate is habit-forming.

Once youve bought the best dark chocolate you can find, take it home, taste it, and try any of the recipes in this book. Youll know then (as if you didnt know already) why deep, dark chocolate is irresistible.

Chocolate as we know it today is a far cry from the cold, peppery drink the Aztec Emperor Montezuma handed to Cortez in 1519. This was not sweet revenge. This was a divine potion to celebrate the second coming of Quetzalcoatl, the fair-skinned Aztec god of wisdom, knowledge, and chocolate.

For centuries, chocolate was primarily enjoyed as a beverage. Its properties were legendary. Montezuma drank a goblet as an aphrodisiac; Casanova preferred it to champagne; and Brillat-Savarin, the famous nineteenth-century French jurist, writer, and gastronome, used it as a mild tranquilizer in his later years. Its been no secret that chocolate is a provocative and addictive flavor. Today, thanks to the ingenuity and skill of generations of chocolate makers, there are countless ways to enjoy it and scores of chocolates from which to choose.

Lets begin by exploring the varieties of dark chocolate we can use to create recipes every bit as seductive as their essential ingredient. We who love deep, dark chocolate are a devoted group, showing bias for the bittersweet and the essence of chocolate itself.

Here are some short-and-sweet explanations of chocolate in its many favorite forms:

unsweetened chocolate

Also known as chocolate liquor, baking chocolate, or bitter chocolate, unsweetened chocolate is simply cacao beans ground to a smooth paste with no added sugar or fat. It consists of two components: cocoa solids (the solids are what give chocolate its color and flavor) and cocoa butter (the butter is what makes the chocolate melt in your mouth and the flavor linger).

dark chocolate

This term defines both bittersweet and semisweet chocolate. If youre curious about the significance of that percentage sign on the label of your dark, bittersweet, or semisweet chocolate bar, consult Chocolate Terminology. As youll see, the higher the percentage of chocolate liquor, the stronger the chocolate flavor will be. Will those percentages interfere with how a recipe turns out? Will a 60 percent chocolate give the same results as a 68 percent or a 70percent? For the recipes in this book, the answer is, Yes. There are exceptions, where I request a particular percentage for example, in Deep, Dark Chocolate Ice Cream the recipe calls for 3 1/2ounces premium dark chocolate (no higher than 62 percent). Thats because the higher the percentage, the more cocoa butter is present. And since cocoa butter freezes harder than butterfat, it makes the ice cream harder to eat (it also can become grainy).

As the percentage of chocolate liquor increases, the chocolate becomes less sweet and the amount of cocoa butter (that is, fat) increases as well. The recipes in