Chocolate

Many cooks are stumped when they try to replicate a chocolate dessert tasted in a restaurant and are left: wondering why their own version doesn’t taste as good. Most of the time it has to do with the quality of the chocolate. In Europe, chocolate is required by law to have the percentage of cocoa—the flavorful aromatic component in chocolate—printed on the package. In general, the higher the cocoa content, the more flavorful the chocolate. For bittersweet chocolate, the cocoa content ranges from around 50 percent all the way up to around 70 percent. Other factors, such as the origin of the cocoa beans (those from Central America are considered the best) and the way the chocolate is processed also influence the quality. My favorite brands are Scharffen Berger, made in Berkeley, California, and Valrhona, from France (see Sources).