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    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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Microwave Tricks: Getting more chocolate power from cocoa

Posted on November 6, 2011 by DebbieN
Chocolate pot from the movie "Chocolat"

The infamous chocolate cauldron, image © Miramax

In the movie Chocolat, the riverboat captain tells the chocolatier that his favorite of all her confections is none other than the prosaic cauldron of hot chocolate she keeps on the hob to thaw out her customers. When she pours out a cup, it’s so thick it’s like hot molten chocolate bars. Hard to imagine how anyone could swallow more than a spoonful of it in reality, but you immediately believe it’s superior to the thin, miserly stuff that’s been passed off as hot chocolate in your childhood. And you’re right.

And on the other hand, how could anyone in their right mind want to down a cup of melted chocolate bars? Too rich, and for me, much too fatty. And with much too much cleanup–the last image that stuck in my mind from Chocolat was actually not the hot chocolate Juliette Binoche handed Johnny Depp and Judi Dench but the thickly encrusted cauldron that had been cooking chocolate all day long. Scary, and what a waste of chocolate for one scene!

So I don’t go for that myself, or at least not on such a grand scale. Though if you want that kind of recipe–go to David Lebovitz’s blog and look for Parisian (or worse yet, with even more chocolate, Belgian) hot chocolate. He’s got two kinds of Mexican hot chocolate drinks too.

Cocoa powder, the ordinary day-to-day stuff of American hot chocolate mixes, seems so much less potent and chocolaty than all the fancy recherché chocolate bars with the cocoa solids percentages, the exotic Latin American or African source names, the single-source, fair-trade, wine-label-styled descriptions. Cocoa powder is so prosaic (unless it’s Scharffen-Berger or Valrhona or another premium brand). How could it possibly be good enough for a high-class, French-style cup of hot chocolate?

Granted, cocoa powder–dutched, natural, either way–it’s pure cocoa solids. But it doesn’t really give you the full chocolate experience if you just mix it into things. Something’s missing.

Most professional chefs and chocolatiers will probably tell you it’s the cocoa butter that’s missing. And they’re not entirely wrong–fat does carry flavor and keeps the more volatile, delicate aromas in the chocolate from evaporating off too quickly or breaking down under heat.

But if that were the entire reason, cocoa powder, stripped of all its fat and stored in warehouses and supermarket shelves for months at a time, would be flavorless and dead by the time you got it home from the store, and we know that’s not the case.

When you make brownies or chocolate cake with cocoa powder, there comes a point in the baking when you suddenly smell the chocolate wherever you are in the house at that moment. Before you even realize you’re smelling it, before any Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, history, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »