Like cheese, coffee, and wine, chocolate has become the food of serious connoisseurs, complete with highbrow terminology and potential snobbery. But I approach chocolate the same way I do cheese or wine: You basically want to start with a delicious ingredient, the best quality that you can afford and find without hassle.
If the chocolate is inviting when you bite into it, it’s certainly good enough for cooking. This is why I avoid chocolate chips and premade sauces; they’re usually not delicious when eaten straight, and it’s simple enough to chunk, chop, or melt a good eating chocolate. Your desserts will be much better for that bit of extra work.
Good chocolate is available everywhere, even in supermarkets. You can even use good candy-bar chocolate
for cooking; you’re not limited to whatever happens to be on the shelf next to the flour. Go by quality first, then by type of chocolate.
For most desserts-and for eating, actually-I turn to bittersweet or semisweet chocolate. To help you make the best decisions, here are the basics.
How Chocolate Is Made
Chocolate starts with cacao beans, the seeds of the tropical cacao tree. Twenty to fifty of them grow in an oblong pod; it takes about four hundred seeds to make a pound of chocolate. Once the seeds and the pulp are collected, they’re fermented, a process that changes their chemistry and develops flavor; from here out they’re called cocoa beans.
The beans are dried (by machine or, preferably, in the sun; you can begin to see how it’s possible to become as obsessive about chocolate as it is about wine). They’re then sorted, roasted, and shelled. All this produces the nib, which is ground and refined into chocolate liquor (which contains no alcohol but can be thought of as a straight shot of chocolate).
Separating the solids from the fat in chocolate liquor results in two products: cocoa powder and cocoa butter.
To get to edible chocolate, the liquor is mixed with other ingredients-sugar, vanilla, additional cocoa butter, milk, or (usually less desirable) vegetable oils or other additives-then gently stirred or “conched.” Before chocolate can be molded and sold, it is tempered, a heating and cooling process that keeps it from crystallizing and makes the chocolate hard, smooth, and glossy.
It’s a complicated procedure, and here’s the bottom line: The quality of the ingredients, the number of additives, and the level of attention during the production process are what distinguishes good chocolate from bad.
Storing Chocolate
There’s no need to refrigerate chocolate, but you should keep it in a cool, dry place (the fridge is as good as any, as long as it’s well wrapped). Stored properly, chocolate can last for at least a year; bittersweet chocolate can even improve as it ages.
Sometimes chocolate develops a white or gray sheen or thin coating: don’t panic. The chocolate hasn’t gone bad; it’s “bloomed,” a condition caused by too much moisture or humidity or fluctuating temperatures, which cause the fat or sugar to come to the surface of the chocolate and crystallize. In either case the chocolate is still perfectly fine for cooking as long as you’re not making coated candy. It’s also okay to eat bloomed chocolate out of hand, though it may be grainy.
Cooking with Chocolate
Good-quality chocolate bars are fine for melting or finely chopping, but if you want big chunks or decorative shavings, buy a piece from a larger brick; specialty and many natural food stores sell chocolate like this. Chop with a chef ’s knife on a cutting board. To make chocolate shavings, put the chocolate on a clean cloth and carefully pull the knife toward you. It might take a couple passes to get the hang of it, but they’re surprisingly easy.
Be careful when you melt chocolate, because it scorches easily. First, chop the chocolate (pieces melt faster than big chunks). Then use a double boiler with your chocolate in the top layer and stir until melted.
Or melt the chocolate directly over the lowest possible heat, keeping a very close eye on it. Or microwave the chocolate for a minute or two at the lowest setting; watch it like a hawk and interrupt to stir once or twice. Melting chocolate with liquids is trickier, so I always melt the chocolate alone, then work with it.
Sweets and 
- consumed moderately, chocolate represents a very efficient toner, being rich in magnesium, phosphor, calcium, iron, most of these coming from cocoa powder
administrated?
fats have been shown to elevate serum cholesterol, and contribute to heart disease and cancer. Do not consume saturated fats! They slow the liver’s ability to remove arter-clogging LDL (low-density lipopreteins) from the blood. However, the nomounsaturated fats aid in removing LDl (bad fats) from the blood stream.