Deep Dark Chocolate

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.

Table of Contents

CHOCOLATE, ANYONE?

know your chocolate

BAKING TIPS AND DEEP, DARK CHOCOLATE SECRETS (
Read this first,
before the recipes)

chocolate cookies and deep, dark brownies

I’ll Have My Cake and Eat Yours, Too

DEEP CHOCOLATE PIES, TARTS, AND A CHEESECAKE

CHOCOLATE PUDDINGS, CUSTARDS, AND A SOUFFLÉ

chilled chocolate desserts and ice creams

fudgy sauces and chocolate fondues

BREAKFAST DELIGHTS AND SMALL BITES

Candies and No-Bake Treats

SIP-IT OR SHAKE-IT DARK CHOCOLATE DRINKS

sources

index

table of equivalents

Chocolate, Anyone?

C’mon in. Yes,
you
. This is the place—and the book—to 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. What’s 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 chocolate’s particular flavor profile. If you’re 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 wouldn’t 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 Sévigné: “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.

You’re 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 of—you guessed it—dark chocolate truffles or fudge. Your kids will delight over Some More S’more Pie, Please, and Full-Tilt Dark Chocolate with Zabaglione will have dinner guests asking for more (as well as asking for the recipe).

Darkchocolate 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. It’s intense and snappy. Brilliantly fruity. Slightly tart. Have no doubt about it, chocolate is habit-forming.

Once you’ve bought the best dark chocolate you can find, take it home, taste it, and try any of the recipes in this book. You’ll know then (as if you didn’t know already) why deep, dark chocolate is irresistible.

Know Your Chocolate

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. It’s 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.

Let’s 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.

Varieties Of Dark Chocolate

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 you’re curious about the significance of that percentage sign on the label of your dark, bittersweet, or semisweet chocolate bar, consult “Chocolate Terminology”. As you’ll 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 70–percent? 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
/
₂
–ounces premium dark chocolate (no higher than 62 percent). That’s 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
Deep Dark Chocolate
allow for a range up to and including 72 percent. Just remember, the higher the percentage, the more chocolate flavor and the less sugar will be present.

bittersweet and semisweet chocolate

These dark chocolates are the heart and soul of this book, but you won’t find their names in the lists of ingredients (although you will see “bittersweet” to describe the taste). That’s because the terms are becoming outmoded. They are not standardized, so one brand’s bittersweet can be another brand’s semisweet. Because neither one contains milk, when it comes to recipes (or to our taste buds), the two are interchangeable.

semisweet and bittersweet chocolate chips and morsels

Chocolate chips and morsels are specially formulated to tolerate high heat and contact with hot baking sheets without melting or scorching. That’s good when it comes to your favorite cookie, but may not be so good if you substitute the chips for baking chocolate. They don’t melt like other dark chocolates because they contain less cocoa butter. While I often substitute a chopped-up chocolate bar for chocolate chips (if chocolate chunks were good enough for Ruth Wakefield to use when she created the first chocolate chip cookie in 1937, they’re good enough for me), I stay away from substituting melted chocolate chips for melted baking chocolate.

dark chocolate buttons

These chocolate wafers are about the size of nickels. They react the same way bar or solid chocolate would in a recipe, but save you the trouble of chopping. (Unlike chips or morsels, they are not formulated to tolerate high heat by removing some of the cocoa butter.) They are sometimes sold as pastilles.

unsweetened cocoa powder

This superfine powder is pulverized chocolate liquor with much of the fat (cocoa butter) pressed out, making it a low fat chocolate ingredient. Its percentage of cocoa butter varies from 10 to 24 percent. Cocoa powder offers a convenient way to get a rich chocolate flavor in baked goods, and it is the one type of chocolate that will work when you discover, halfway through a recipe, that you won’t have enough melted chocolate. If the recipe calls for 1 ounce of unsweetened chocolate, simply use 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder mixed with 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil as a substitute.

unsweetened dutch-process cocoa powder

Dutch-process cocoa does not refer to a brand name but to the homeland of its creator. A Dutchman named Coenraad van Houten discovered the process of adding harmless alkali to cocoa to neutralize its natural acidity, making it less astringent. Advocates say the chocolate flavor is more well rounded; detractors call it dull. It
does
deepen the color, giving recipes in which it’s used a rich, dark intensity. This is one reason I often substitute a small amount of Dutch-process for natural cocoa powder in a recipe.