FoodBanter.com - View Single Post

at Sat, 13 Dec 2003 02:43:28 GMT in
> ,
(Eddy) wrote :

>Hey Alex:
>
>Thanks for all the information you gave me. Sorry, if I seemed a
>little impatient. I wanted to get the chocolate today, to make the
>brownies tonight.

Usually it's best to post questions several days in advance on newsgroups.
Sometimes you can get an answer right away, but you can't count on it. I
generally post questions a week before the information I need is relevant.

BTW, sorry for not being able to respond sooner on your follow-up posts. I
was out of town for a couple of days.

....
>> For the Carenero family, ...
>> Apamate and Mijao are the high-cocoa-butter chocolates. Because of the
>> particular formulae,... they're not as intense.
>??? I'm sorry but I'm really new to this. Not as intense chocolate or
>butter flavor? (I'm assuming chocolate flavor here)
>What do cocoa solids do for the chocoalte?

Cocoa butter is not regular dairy butter, it's the fat of the cocoa bean.
So a high cocoa butter content will not make the chocolate taste buttery.
The high-cocoa-butter chocolates from El Rey don't have as intense a
chocoalate flavour.

As for what cocoa solids do, first, I will make the distinction between
defatted cocoa solids and simply cocoa solids. Cocoa solids include both
the defatted cocoa and the cocoa butter. Defatted cocoa solids are the
powder you get if you remove all the cocoa butter from chocolate. As for
what they do, they lend virtually all the flavour. It's not all in the
defatted cocoa solids - there is some in cocoa butter, which tends to round
out the flavour and lean it a bit more away from earthy flavours (pure
cocoa tends to taste a bit harsh and earthy by comparison to chocolate).
Nevertheless, the defatted cocoa solids are what make chocolate, by and
large, taste like chocolate.

>
>I just wanted to try one first. As you can tell I have no idea what a
>good chocolate brand is, but I found El Rey when I did a search on
>Criollo Cocoa.
>Anyway, the first batch I made was with Hershey's (Yuck!!). I tried
>one piece, and decided to take the rest to work (they eat anything at
>work & they like it).
>

at Sat, 13 Dec 2003 23:05:55 GMT in <nXMCb.190147$ri.27544237
@twister.nyc.rr.com>, (Tea) wrote :
>You can use plain old Baker's Chocolate for this recipe, instead of making
>yourself crazy. Use any chocolate that is marked 'unsweetened' or
>'bittersweet' and it will work.

I disagree - strongly. Baker's is incredibly bad chocolate, IMHO absolutely
the bottom of the barrel. The OP mentions above that he wasn't satisfied
with Hershey's. If so, I would say it's a virtual certainty he won't be
satisfied with Baker's, either.

>Thanks again for all the information you gave me. I found one local
>store here in Tacoma that at least sells El Rey. Maybe I can try that
>and decide to get a better one for the final batch.

You're in Tacoma? In that case, you've got it made. Simply drive up to
Seattle and visit either PCC (who stocks Michel Cluizel, maker of the best
unsweetened in the business: Noir Infini), or DeLaurenti, who stock
Guittard, Valrhona, Bonnat, and a host of others. There are still more
stores in Seattle that have all sorts of good chocolate - try Larry's
Market, Metropolitan Market in Queen Anne, Central Co-Op/Madison Market in
Capitol Hill - the choices are almost endless.

> I wanted to bake
>brownies as a dessert for the Christmas Dinner.

In that case, I think your timing is perfect. You're asking just enough in
advance that you can expect good results.

> Anyway, hope you
>enjoy the recipe.
>

As those who frequent this NG know, I have my own brownie recipe which IMHO
defines perfection in brownies, but yours does look pretty good. It's going
to come out cakey and sweet, from the looks of it. There'll be some chew to
them as well.

at Sat, 13 Dec 2003 03:02:16 GMT in
> ,
(Eddy) wrote :

>Hello Alex:
>
>I went to the website you gave me Chocosphere or something close to
>that. I looked around and found that Valrhona has a Chuao chocolate.
>However the Chuao chocolate is Bittersweet.

You should not buy the Chuao from Valrhona from Chocosphere because they
are carrying the *definitive* Chuao chocolate - Amedei. Amedei's Chuao is
almost as good as chocolate gets, period. The Chuao will make *awe-
inspiring* brownies, if you're willing to spend that much, because its
flavour profile is almost the perfect one for a brownie.

> The recipe I have calls
>for unsweetened.

It's easy to substitute bittersweet for unsweetened, when you have the
cocoa solids percentage listed - you simply adjust the amount of chocolate
upwards by the ratio of 100/cocoa solids percentage, and decrease the
amount of sugar in the amount of (100-cocoa solids percentage)*{amount of
chocolate you obtained in the first calculation}. So, for instance, your
recipe calls for 8 oz of unsweetened chocolate. If you decide to go the
ultra-splurge route and use Amedei Chuao for your Christmas brownies,
first, you note that Amedei's Chuao is 70% cocoa solids. So, the amount of
chocolate you need is 8*(100/70) = 11.4 oz. As a result you need to
decrease your amount of sugar by (11.4*30%) = 3.4 oz. It's best to weigh
this but you could approximate sugar with 1:1 volume to weight, and then
take out 3.4 oz of sugar from where you started, leaving you with
2 cups, 12.6 oz.
I'll note that you'll thus need 323 g of chocolate, i.e. a minimum of 7 50g
bars, which at $7.75 each, would perhaps make these the most expensive
brownies in the world, containing $54.25 in chocolate! Still, if you want
to go that far, it might well be worth it...

> Now there is a whole bunch of terms that seem to
>describe the same.
>What do all those things mean anyway?
>
>Unsweetened

Chocolate with no, or at most, a trivial amount of sugar in them (it's
typical, for example, for unsweetened to have traces of sugar from the
manufacturing process). 99% and above is unsweetened.

>Bittersweet

Vague. Generally, the second-least-sweet grade of sweetened chocolate
(after "extra-bittersweet" chocolate). The USDA defines it as any sweetened
chocolate over 50% cocoa solids. IMHO that's being very liberal - anything
with only 50% cocoa solids is going to taste very sweet. By my definition,
bittersweet starts at about 66% cocoa solids and goes up to about 75% cocoa
solids.

>Semi-sweet

Similarly vague. Generally, the middle of the range in sweetened
chocolates. The USDA's definition is between 35% and 50% cocoa solids. IMHO
a more appropriate range is between 55% and 66% cocoa solids.

>Bitter

Even more vague. This is more of a common term in Britain. It can either
mean a rather bittersweet dark chocolate, or an unsweetened chocolate.
Usually in Britain it means bittersweet because true unsweetened is pretty
rare there.

--
Alex Rast

(remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)