The Great book every chocophile has been waiting for, pastry chef David
Lebovitz's guide is a jam-packed snapshot of the global chocolate
picture. In this compact volume, he gives a succinct cacao botany
lesson, explains the process of chocolate making, runs through chocolate
terminology and types, presents information on health benefits, offers
an evaluating and buying primer, profiles the world's top chocolate
makers and chocolatiers (with a whole chapter dedicated to Paris
alone!), and shares dozens of little-known factoids in sidebars
throughout the book. More than 30 of his favorite chocolate
recipes—from Black-Bottom Cupcakes to Homemade Rocky Road Candy,
Orange and Rum Chocolate Mousse Cake to Double Chocolate Chip Espresso
Cookies—are icing on the cake. His extensive resource section (with
websites for international ordering) can bring the world's best
chocolate to every door. A self-avowed chocoholic, Lebovitz nibbles
chocolate every day—and with THE GREAT BOOK OF CHOCOLATE in hand, he
figures the rest of us will too.
A compact connoisseur's guide, with
recipes, to today's cutting-edge array of chocolates and chocolate
makers from former Chez Panisse pastry chef David Lebovitz.
Includes more than 50 location and food photographs.
Chocolate—like its predecessors coffee, wine, and bread—is the latest darling of the food scene.
The
New York Times on Lebovitz's first book: “Instructions are clear and
simple, and the recipes are so good that it becomes clear what a master
baker he is.”
By
B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States)
`The Great Book of Chocolate', David Lebovitz' third book, is much, much
more than a book of chocolate recipes. It is a great resource,
including recipes, lore, history, sources, anecdotes, manufacture,
producers, and botany of cacao and chocolate.
Even if you have any other book on chocolate, you will find things
in this book which do not appear in any others, as it has information I
have not seen in about a half dozen books on chocolate and about 20
hours of Food Network shows on chocolate done by everyone from Alton
Brown to Tyler Florence to Gordon Elliot.
One of the most interesting new facts I found in this book is that
like coffee, there are two different naturally occurring varieties of
the cacao plant, plus a manmade hybrid. One of the varieties is much
more delicate and much less common than the other, accounting for about
5% of the world's chocolate, but it is a much richer product. Very few
chocolate processors deal with this criollo variety. Most use the much
more common forestero variety or the hybrid trinitario.
Like tea and coffee and olive oil, cacao is a highly complex
product, much of whose more desirable and subtle properties are
destroyed by too much heat during processing. Heat is also the enemy of
chocolate when melting and tempering chocolate to be used for cooking.
This brings up one of my very few complaints about this book in that it
explains a very primitive method for heating and tempering chocolate. I
would have devoted at least one page to explaining how professional
chocolate tempering pots work, and in what way one could be improvised.
The author gives some very brief suggestions using a heating pad, but a
paragraph plus an illustration would have been dandy. Other explanations
in the book would have been well served by an illustration or a caption
to a picture, but these are small matters in light of the overall
quality of the book.
While Lebovitz was already a highly talented and accomplished pastry
chef when he started writing this book, he has gone to the extra effort
of investigating first hand the workings of premium chocolatiers in San
Francisco, Paris and Brussels. He has also recently completed a course
in chocolate at Callebaut College in Belgium.
The chapters in this book, after the introduction which covers Lebovitz personal involvement with chocolate includes:
Chocolate Explained gives the history, botany, and processing of the
cacao plant, plus some stories of two important American chocolate
producers, Hershey and Sharfen Berger.
Sustainability of Cacao discusses the fragile place of cacao in jungle ecosystems and the production of organic chocolate.
A Chocolate Primer discusses the forms of chocolate, from pure
chocolate liqueur to cocoa power, plus an explanation of tempering.
While he points out that there is no difference between `semisweet' and
`bittersweet' chocolate, he does not discuss the availability of
chocolates with sweetening graded by percent, as done by Vahlrona. It is
also surprising that while so many other chocolate companies are
mentioned in the book, this very important French company is not. It is
not even listed in the very good list of resources in the back of the
book.
Chocolate and Wellness reveals that carefully processed chocolate
has a lot more antioxidants in it than even health food stars prunes,
raisins, and blueberries. Not only that, it has lots of other good
stuff, including some compounds which work as an antidepressant.
Buying Chocolate gives a brief consumers guide to sources for good
chocolate, including a detailed chronicle of seven days spend working at
the shop of the best chocolatier in Brussels.
Chocolate of Paris continues the buying guide with a focus on
sources in Paris that rivals Brussels as one of the leading chocolatier
centers in the world.
The 34 recipes certainly do not cover the whole world of chocolate
baking and candy making, but they give you a pretty good sampling of
both conventional products such as hot chocolate, truffles, fudge, and
cakes; to the slightly unusual such as chocolate and cherry scones, mint
and chocolate crème anglaise, and bourbon mud pie; to the really
unusual such as chocolate sauerkraut cake and chocolate pizza dough.
Lebovitz says many of the recipes are original and, as he is a much,
much better baker than I will ever be, even in my dreams, I will accept
these recipes for being the crème of the crop. As I said above, this
book will not replace your books by Flo Braker, Nick Malgieri, or Alice
Medrich or even Lebovitz' earlier books on desserts. It is much more of a
supplement to resources for making the best use in recipes by all
bakers and chocolatiers.
As the book is much more valuable for its websites, addresses, and
information than it is for its recipes, the awkward tall and skinny
format does not annoy me as much as it may in other cookbooks. I just
wish Ten Speed Press would come out with an explanation for why they are
so in love with this tall, skinny format.
Highly recommended enhancement to your enjoying chocolate.
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