chocolate sauce is best made with semi-sweet or bitter chocolate, often with a little butter and vanilla. It goes particularly well with vanilla ice cream, and cools so rapidly on contact with the ice cream that it solidifies almost at once, providing a contrast in texture as well as in flavour. This combination is called a Dame blanche, especially in Belgium. Chocolate sauce with pear, as in Poires belle Hélène, is another good combination.
Certain sauces with other names incorporate chocolate as an ingredient. In Spain, for example, it is used in a sauce for spiny lobster. In Mexico it is used in some versions of mole.
