A Passion for Chocolate

Bernachon and his kin own a legendary chocolate business in Lyon, France. Beranbaum is a thorough and careful cookbook author. The result is the most useful chocolate cook book that I own. It is a very productive resource for chocolate recipes. Whenever I need a recipe for, say, a chocolate version of Gateau St. Honore or L'Opera, this is book I go to first, and it is the chocolate book I bake from most frequently. A word of warning, however: the recipes are not necessarily easy to do, and the uninitiated might have some difficulty following the more involved recipes. This book is a mostly traditional collection of classic, French patissierie. You will find things like buche de noel, caraque, mille-feuille, succes, madeleines, profiteroles, macarons, rochers, mousse, nougats, trois-freres, and truffles. The chapter on basics is probably the most valuable chapter: it has all the basics, such as genoise, pate feuilletee, croissant, pate a choux, pate sucree. pate brisee, succes, meringue, ganache, creme patissiere, and creme chantilly. Beranbaum has done an excellent job of adapting these recipes for the American kitchen. All the ingredients are listed in both volume and weight measures. The procedures are thorough, complete, and reliable. I do have a few objections. There are some easy recipes, viz Brownies or Viennese Hot Chocolate, but most are rather advanced and not for the casual home cook. Some kind of difficulty rating system would have been a great help. The chocolate pound cake recipe is the wacky one that uses egg whites beaten to stiff peaks, not a real pound cake by my standards. Several recipes use a chocolate coating, but proper instructions for tempering chocolate is not supplied anywhere in the book; for these recipes, I suggest you ignore the author's statements about heating and cooling chocolate and resort to a chocolate cook book that has full instructions for tempering. It has these chapters: cakes; little cakes and cookies; desserts; confections; beverages; kitchen basics; decorations.