Chocolate has gotten so serious. Fortunately for cooks looking to make a chocolate treat on Valentine's Day, some of the latest chocolate cookbooks are seriously fun.
Stephan Lagorce's Chocolat (Octopus Publishing, 2008, $21.99), cleverly packaged like a giant chocolate bar, is hard to resist. A Year in Chocolate (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2008, $35), by chocolatier Jacques Torres, celebrates chocolate in recipes for holidays all through the calendar. His Valentine's Day chapter has whimsical strawberries painted with chocolate to look like they're wearing tuxedos. But if you don't want to fuss, he'll also teach you how to make some good hot chocolate, six different ways.
And Heavenly Chocolate Desserts (Ryland Peters & Small, 2008, $19.95), a collection of recipes from a group of food writers, has a wonderful homey invention we're eager to see more of - the Brownie Lava Dessert. (Don't make it for your valentine unless you'd like to see him or her stick around forever - it's that good.)
So don't get too hung up on cacao percentages and origins of chocolate, Torres says. Listen to, well, your heart.
"I always tell my customers, the best chocolate to you is the chocolate that you prefer," he said in an interview. "I usually tell people to test different chocolates. For Valentine's Day, I would listen to my significant other and see what my significant other loves."
For his own cooking, Torres has a few basic rules - chocolate should be not too dark and not too light, but bittersweet, around 60 to 70 percent cacao.
Whatever you do, when you're making hot chocolate, don't use cocoa powder, Torres says. "You want real hot chocolate, use real chocolate."
His basic recipe involves heating 1 cup of whole milk over medium heat in a pan, then slowly whisking in 2 ounces of chopped bittersweet chocolate. For a coffee-flavored version, you can add a teaspoon of freeze-dried coffee granules, dissolved in a tablespoon of hot water, with the chocolate. Or stir the milk with a candy cane for peppermint flavor. Or scrape seeds from a vanilla bean into the milk, then add the bean to the pan, before you whisk in the chocolate.
When he does turn to cocoa powder for cakes, profiteroles and the like in his book, Torres uses only the Dutch-processed version, which he says mixes into a batter better than natural cocoa. (If you can't find Dutch-processed cocoa, try Hershey's Special Dark cocoa, a mix of Dutch-processed and natural cocoas. It worked well for us in the chocolate angel food cake recipe we tried.)
