Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate

by Alice Medrich and William Tolbert III

Book Overview

It is hard, today, to imagine a time when the word bittersweet was rarely spoken, when 70 percent of the chocolate purchased by Americans was milk chocolate. Today's world of chocolate is a much larger universe, where not only is the quality better and variety wider, but the very composition of the chocolate has changed. To do justice to these new chocolates, which contain more pure chocolate and less sugar, we need a fresh approach to chocolate desserts...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1579651607
• ISBN13: 9781579651602
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Artisan Publishers
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 2.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.8" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Chocolate

Alice Medrich tells you everything you will ever need to know about cooking with chocolate: equipment, measuring, ingredients, types of chocolate, storing chocolate, melting chocolate-- it's all here. Now I know how to tell if baking powder is still good, why white chocolate should be cut into very small pieces before melting, how to substitute different kinds of chocolate in a recipe and why to avoid mixing water with chocolate at all costs. In her introduction, Ms. Medrich says she is attempting to write simple recipes for "busy home cooks." For the most part, she accomplishes what she set out to do. The recipes in general appear to be straight forward and with plenty of instructions for the most wary of beginners-- where to place the rack in the oven, exactly how long to beat a mixture, whether a creation tastes better the first or second day, for instance. Although there are several other recipes I want to try, I bought this cookbook for one recipe alone, the Tiger Cake (page 269). It has everything going for it. It is absolutely stunning in appearance-- a five-year-old named it because of the stripes-- it is simple to make, and tastes divine. The twist here is that the cake substitutes extra virgin olive oil for the usual butter and has a half teaspoon of white pepper in it. And as the author says, it really is better the second day-- should you have any left. In addition to the recipes, as the title indicates, Ms. Medrich has many stories about her experiences in chocolate. She could have called the book "My Journey from Milky Ways to Chocolate Truffles." There is much to be gleaned from this book. You will come back to it again and again, both for her stories and for guidance on baking with chocolate. Finally, a word about the layout and design of this book: the desserts are beautifully photographed and the recipes for the most part are done with brown type on either a white or pale blue background so the volume is as pretty as it is helpful.

First Rate Explanation of Chocolate Mysteries and Recipes

No one should try to do any serious work with chocolate without reading this book or another equally good book on the subject. One of the first things you learn in this book is that there are as many, if not more subtleties and ambiguities in the marketing of chocolate as there are in just about any other basic food product such as flour or olive oil.On this matter, I am slightly concerned that Ms. Medrich, in an otherwise superb book, does not simply drop all vagueness in chocolate labeling and go with products which are boldly labeled by percentage of chocolate liqueur to sugar. My guess is that while very high-end (expensive) product lines such as Vahlrona do this kind of labeling, more commonly available product lines do not do it. But then, we still wouldn't have leeks and shallots or organic products in our grocery stores if people such as Julia Child and Alice Waters hadn't started making a fuss about it. But I digress.Another regret I get from reading this book has nothing to do with the quality of Ms. Medrich work. It is the fact that the great American chocolate producer Hershey has so little to contribute to those of us who wish to bake with high quality chocolate.The significance of the book's title is that bittersweet chocolate is the most commonly used form of chocolate for baking. This brings up another issue with chocolate cooking. Unlike white wheat flour, a relatively simple product, chocolate used for baking, that is, bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, is a rather complex product, being an emulsion of solids in an oil, cocoa butter. This means that the general warning about following procedures exactly becomes even more important. Another subtlety in chocolate products is the formulation of chocolate chips used in Toll House cookies. It would seem so easy to zip open a bag of chocolate chips and melt them instead of chopping down a block of semisweet with a knife. The problem is that those little chocolate chips are specially formulated to not melt like normal chocolate so they hold their shape in cookies. Melting them like conventional chocolate will just give you a mess.The most important warning one can take away from this book about chocolate products is the difference between conventional cocoa powder and Dutch Process cocoa powder. On the face of it, removing some bitterness from cocoa through the Dutch Process may seem like a good thing. But, the author points out that the process acts like a filter on music which removes all the high notes, so you end up with a less interesting flavor. Also, since there is a big difference in pH between conventional and Dutch Process, you cannot substitute one for the other safely if your recipe includes baking soda or baking powder.The stories about the problems with melting chocolate probably outnumber all other calls for culinary advice. The stuff is finicky in the extreme. The irony is that the properties which make it finicky around heat are the same things which give it such a lu

For chocolate lovers, simply the best cookbook in years.

I've made many of Alice Medrich's recipes from her previous books, and none of them has ever disappointed. But this book is a standout. It is not at all just a collection of recipes; it actually has the ability to change the way cooks look at and use chocolate.The theme of the book is that, over the past decades, most American cookbooks dealing with chocolate have been written assuming that the home cook is using typical supermarket chocolate, which may be servicable, but which is undistinguished. In the past few years, though, superior chocolates have become very widely available, chocolates with complexity and sophistication. Past recipes, with their heavy reliance on added sugar, fats, and flavorings, may work for less remarkable chocolates. But these recipes may overwhem and mask the unique characteristics of a finer chocolate. Assuming the home cook is using such a fine chocolate, Ms. Medrich analyzes and reconstructs many traditional recipes, and creates new ones as well, with an eye towards showcasing fine chocolate's personality rather than muting it.The recipes are incredible just to read (the half-dozen I've made myself so far have been easy to construct and superb to eat). Ms. Medrich's attention to detail is, as always, excellent; most of the recipes even includes notes describing how to adjust for chocolates with varying percentages of chocolate liquor. (If you're baking with a 60% chocolate bar, for instance, you'd use different quantities of added sugar and fat than you'd use if baking with a 72% chocolate.)Medrich also offers detailed explanations of the origins and philosophy behind certain dishes (mousse, for instance, or truffles). She devotes a large section of the book to the use of, and recipes for, roasted cocoa nibs. I've never before seen a book treat them as a serious ingredient in their own right.There is also a wonderfully broad selection of recipes that utilize chocolate in savory dishes and entrees...miles beyond Chicken Mole.Aesthetically, Bittersweet is elegantly designed and contains a decent number of color photographs (I crave more, though). For chocoholics, this book really is an eye-opener. Unreseveredly recommended.

A real pleasure, both to read and to bake from...

Alice Medrich opened her first Cocolat shop when I was an impoverished undergraduate at Berkeley in the mid-1970s. I learned an important lesson from her: Since even the poorest student could buy a single Cocolat truffle, just that one truffle, made with care from superior ingredients, would delight, satiate, and inspire in a way that a bag of M & Ms never could."Bittersweet" offers bakers (at any level of expertise) enticing new ingredients and technique that go into the creation of memorable chocolate desserts. She revisits old favorites, such as brownies, and offers variations; in my opinion, the Lacy Coconut-Topped Brownies alone are worth the price of the book. Mousse also gets the Medrich treatment, including a very successful variation that can be whipped up completely dairy-free, if desired.Medrich also suggests some surprising ways to incorporate unsweetened chocolate into savory dishes, such as an astonishingly delicious Italian dolce-forte ("sweet and strong") meat sauce for pasta.This is a fun book to read, which can't always be said of a cookbook, and the photographs are stunning. Memoirs are currently all the rage in the publishing industry, but here's one that doesn't leave the reader with a raging case of indigestion. Though many people consider Alice Medrich to be America's reigning chocolate queen, she isn't the one telling you so. In this unpretentious, informative book, her desire to share the joy of a bittersweet-chocolate moment shines through on every page.