Chocolate: From Simple Cookies to Extravagant Showstoppers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060187115 ISBN 13: 9780060187118

Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks, 1998

Nick Malgieri, who taught us everything we need to know about baking in How to Bake, takes on chocolate, the world's favorite food. With the authoritative accessibility he brings to his teaching, Nick bridges the gap between the professional baker and the home cook. He knows techniques and ingredients and he teaches them with hand-holding efficiency. In ten chapters, Nick offers a primer on basics and every kind of chocolate from coca to chips and white chocolate (and why it isn't really chocolate in the strictest sense) to big dark slabs of the world's favorite luxury food and the many, many ways to enjoy it.

Information on storage, handling, and the fundamentals needed to create chocolate confections is clear and concise. Recipe sections include everything you need to know to turn the food of the gods into desserts for us mortals: cakes and cookies, creams and custards, ice creams, pies and pastries, sauces and beverages, truffles and pralines, dipped and molded chocolates, all adapted for the home cook.

Illustrated with four-color photographs throughout, all 380 luscious recipes will send a shiver of delight down the spine of every chocolate lover. Chocolate is definitive without being intimidating; it is a true home companion for anyone who wants to cook with chocolate.

Review:

Nick Malgieri is one smart cookie. He opens Chocolate with information about all the basics on our favorite sweet's history and production. He then moves right into 360 recipes.

Chocolate provides recipes for every intensity of chocolove and all levels of culinary skills. There are simple mix-bake-cut cakes, a mud-rich fudge sauce that hardens on ice cream, a collection of ice creams to go with it, and a killer Rich Chocolate Mousse.

Any comfortable cook, particularly one who's mastered the techniques in How to Bake, Great Italian Desserts, and Malgieri's other equally clear and precise works, can turn out Cream Puff Truffles, Chocolate Brownie Tart, a French Buche de Noel, and most of the other recipes in this dessert-lover's dream book.

Dedicated amateurs and professional cooks will appreciate Malgieri's explicit guidance for the process of tempering, which is necessary for making certain chocolate confections, and the recipes for European-style molded confections such as liqueur-filled cordials, and hand-dipped masterpieces, including Raspberry Tricolors. Less ambitious chocoholics might attempt the 26 kinds of truffles or play with Chocolate Plastic for making decorations. And no one should miss Chocolate's final chapter, the over-the-top "Showpieces and Decorating Projects."

This book is lavish with color photos. The chapter openings, shot with the artistry of Irving Penn still lifes, are so breathtaking you can taste them. --Dana Jacobi

About the Author:

Nick Malgieri is the author of seven books, including A Baker's Tour, Perfect Cakes, Chocolate, and the James Beard Award–winning How to Bake. He is director of the baking program at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. His website, www.nickmalgieri .com, includes a schedule of his guest teacher appearances across the country.