Gale Gand - Chocolate & Vanilla

Many people see things in terms of black and white, but I always seem to see things in terms of chocolate and vanilla. Maybe thats because the first important decision I can remember making had to do with choosing between chocolate or vanilla at Tastee-Freez.

Whenever Chicagos summer heat and humidity became too much to bear, my mother, brother, and I would tumble into my fathers Thunderbird convertible and go to cool ourselves with soft-serve ice cream cones on the Tastee-Freez patio. In the late 1950s, soft-serve ice creama kind of frozen custardwas popular at many drive-ins, but we thought Tastee-Freezs was the absolute best. There were only two flavors, and in my five-year-old mind I remember thinking my personality would be forever defined by my choice. Was I a golden girl? or a chocolate chick?a decision made all the more difficult because not only did I have to state publicly which flavor I wanted, but then I had to choose between dips: vanilla butterscotch angel dip or chocolate devil dip. Was I going to follow my big brothers lead and go with chocolate all the way, or assert my independence with all vanilla? It then occurred to me that I could just play the middle and choose vanilla ice cream with a devil dip.

After twenty years as a professional pastry chef, I still havent decided whether Im a chocolate chick or a golden girl, but I have come to the conclusion that most people are one or the other. Even as you read this Ill bet youve already decided which camp youre inand which camp your friends and loved ones fall into as well.

I wrote this book to pay homage to Americas two favorite flavors, to share some of the chocolate and vanilla recipes that mean the most to me and that I really love to make, and to help indulge the chocolate and vanilla lovers in your lives.

Theres more than a good chance that theres an ardent chocoholic in your close circle, because while vanilla reigned as Americas queen flavor for almost two hundred years, now chocolate is king and even seems to be gaining in popularity. At Tru, the fine-dining restaurant in Chicago I co-own and where I work as an executive pastry chef, I love going into the dining room and asking guests to let me choose desserts for their table. I begin by asking them if theyre chocolate people or custard people (custard being just a code word for vanilla). Without question, the chocolate people make up a very vocal and emphatic majorityBring on the five-course chocolate collection!and Im always happy to oblige.

As a pastry chef, Ive always known that understanding the history of and working with chocolate is like acquiring a much-needed second language: You can live with knowing just the basics of Chocolate 101, or keep going for your PhD. My knowledge fell somewhere in between until a few years ago when I took my whole Tru pastry staff to a lecture about the history of chocolate at the Field Museum in Chicago given by Michael Coe, author (with Sophie D. Coe) of The True History of Chocolate. I had what I like to call my chocolate mini-epiphany. I realized I wanted to learn more about this ingredient I was holding in my hands and working with every day. What is so magical about chocolate that it elicits so much passion, so much joy, and so much pleasure?

The intriguing historical saga of the cacao bean begins deep in the tropical forests of the New World, where the bean was once ground into a paste by hand to make a sacred drink for the Mayans and Aztecs. Next it travels to Europe where cacao became the favorite beverage in the royal courts; and then finally the story brings us to today, where chocolate is one of the worlds most popular flavors and is manufactured using sophisticated technology based on ancient methods. (Im still amazed, even after making chocolate myself, that crunchy beans tediously and laboriously ground over and over again with sugar can be transformed into unctuously smooth and sublime chocolate.) Now every time I take a bite of chocolate, I appreciate it even more than before.

I hope that knowing just a little about the history of chocolate will increase your own chocolate appreciation, even if youre simply sneaking a few chocolate chips as you make your next batch of cookie dough. But what I really hope is that youll be in the kitchen making one of the recipes from this book. Second only to the pleasure I get from seeing the delight on someones face as they take a bite of one of my desserts, is sharing the recipe for that dessert and knowing theyll go home, make it, and share that delight with people they love.