Susie Heller, producer of cookbooks and cooking shows including The French Laundry Cookbook, says in the introduction that when she began working on The Essence of Chocolate she wasn’t so sure it was the dream job that most people would think it would be. She worried that all the chocolate around her home would mean weight gain until she met Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger, "two very lean men," and she wondered what their secret could be. She soon learned that it wasn't about quantity but quality:
- Working with great chocolate has changed how I bake and eat chocolate. There is such a satisfying feeling when you taste a true artisanal chocolate. The question then became, how do we translate this experience into the recipes chosen for this book? We began by choosing recipes that focused on the flavor of the chocolate. This book doesn‘t call for a lot of fancy embellishments or difficult methods; it's about the ‘essence' of chocolate.
Susie Heller also says that when baking you need to trust your instincts. Use the baking times in the book as a guideline; don’t just follow it blindly because there are so many variables, which include altitude, humidity, type of chocolate, flour, butter, and the temperature of your oven. I liked that they didn’t believe that the recipes were set in stone.
Before you can dig into the decadent, delicious, deliriously delightful recipes they equip you with some of the basic techniques and tools that you will need to create them. Also Robert Steinberg talks about his journey to chocolate in "Before We Made Chocolate: From Medicine to Chocolate" and in John Scharffenberger's "From Winemaking to Chocolate" you learn how the partnership of America’s premier chocolate makers came about.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
2 - Katie McNeill
thank you! :)
3 - Doug (retired in France)
It is great to see chocolate recipes that focus on real quality. As you point out, it is easy to be trapped into looking at quantity. Now that I've retired to France, I have more time to spend in the kitchen and look forward to this.
4 - Katie McNeill
All of the recipes are fantastic and they aren't the kind of thing that you will only make once. I hope you try some of them with all that good French chocolate you have there! :)