Product Description

Nick Malgieri, who taught us everything we need to know about baking in How to Bake, takes on chocolate, the world's favorite food. With the authoritative accessibility he brings to his teaching, Nick bridges the gap between the professional baker and the home cook. He knows techniques and ingredients and he teaches them with hand-holding efficiency. In ten chapters, Nick offers a primer on basics and every kind of chocolate from coca to chips and white chocolate (and why it isn't really chocolate in the strictest sense) to big dark slabs of the world's favorite luxury food and the many, many ways to enjoy it.

Information on storage, handling, and the fundamentals needed to create chocolate confections is clear and concise. Recipe sections include everything you need to know to turn the food of the gods into desserts for us mortals: cakes and cookies, creams and custards, ice creams, pies and pastries, sauces and beverages, truffles and pralines, dipped and molded chocolates, all adapted for the home cook.

Illustrated with four-color photographs throughout, all 380 luscious recipes will send a shiver of delight down the spine of every chocolate lover. Chocolate is definitive without being intimidating; it is a true home companion for anyone who wants to cook with chocolate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #250188 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-01
• Released on: 1998-09-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Amazon.com
Nick Malgieri is one smart cookie. He opens Chocolate with information about all the basics on our favorite sweet's history and production. He then moves right into 360 recipes.

Chocolate provides recipes for every intensity of chocolove and all levels of culinary skills. There are simple mix-bake-cut cakes, a mud-rich fudge sauce that hardens on ice cream, a collection of ice creams to go with it, and a killer Rich Chocolate Mousse.

Any comfortable cook, particularly one who's mastered the techniques in How to Bake, Great Italian Desserts, and Malgieri's other equally clear and precise works, can turn out Cream Puff Truffles, Chocolate Brownie Tart, a French Buche de Noel, and most of the other recipes in this dessert-lover's dream book.

Dedicated amateurs and professional cooks will appreciate Malgieri's explicit guidance for the process of tempering, which is necessary for making certain chocolate confections, and the recipes for European-style molded confections such as liqueur-filled cordials, and hand-dipped masterpieces, including Raspberry Tricolors. Less ambitious chocoholics might attempt the 26 kinds of truffles or play with Chocolate Plastic for making decorations. And no one should miss Chocolate's final chapter, the over-the-top "Showpieces and Decorating Projects."

This book is lavish with color photos. The chapter openings, shot with the artistry of Irving Penn still lifes, are so breathtaking you can taste them. --Dana Jacobi

From Library Journal
In the style of Malgieri's authoritative How To Bake (LJ 8/95), here is a comprehensive guide to chocolate, with more than 300 recipes for cakes, creams and mousses, pies and tarts, sauces, and more. The introduction covers the basics, and each succeeding chapter elaborates on specific desserts and confections, with recipes usually organized from easiest to most elaborate. Instructions are clear though fairly concise (Malgieri's no Maida Heatter), but there are detailed directions for working with chocolate and other trickier techniques. Marcel Desaulniers's chocolate books (e.g., Death by Chocolate Cookies, LJ 12/97) are flashier, but Malgieri covers a lot more ground. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Entertainment Weekly, 12/11/98

Paeans to chocolate are usually sumptuous coffee-table affairs, with little practical instruction on how to actually create the desserts arrayed within. Here, though, is a cookbook packed with detailed techniques and tips.

Customer Reviews

A must for any serious or not so serious baker
I turn to this book constantly! It has so many excellent recipes in it. If there is one baker who has truly inspired me, whom I would love to meet, it's this guy!! The Chocolate Raspberry Bavarian is a family/friend favorite. Some of the recipes can seem challenging, but with patience, you'll realize how simple they really are. Nick Malgieri isn't one of those bakers who thinks you'll know what went wrong--he anticipates the little 'oops' and gives step-by-step 'how to fix it'. I can't tell you how many times his instructions have saved my recipes. He's a must in any kitchen.

Chocaholic Must Have
Its the most expensive book that I've got in by collection, well.. glad to say that I think I used my peso(Philippine Money) wisely coz I haven't regretted this purchase. So far since last christmas season when I first got it, I tried 3 recipes all successful. Its the first time I made brownies where the middle isn't raw which is a good thing, coz that has been my problem ever since. Not any more! The pictures are fantastic but I with there could be more, I mean who gets tired of looking at chocolates? Nobody that I know :)

Chocolate made easy
I bought this book for two reasons: first, I am a chocophile. Second, Malgieri's reputation. I have his book "How to Bake," which is excellent and all the recipes I've tried work. That is one of his fortes. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to plunk down a chunk of money for a cookbook with recipes that don't work. These do.

My one an only criticism is that he's not a chocolate fanatic in the true sense. His information and recipes are good not great. If you want the definitive work on Chocolate by a true connoisseur get "Death by Chocolate" by Marcel Desaulniers...exquisite! Malgeiri's book, however, is good in it's own right and deserves a spot on your book shelf.