Title: Chocolate for Baking (Information)
Categories: Chocolate Info
Yield: 1 Info file

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Cocoa Powder: Flavor: Dusty, and intensely chocolatey. Use to flavor an overall recipe such as brownies. Also used for hot cocoa and for dusting truffles and other desserts. It's much easier to add to flour than melted chocolate, and it has less fat. Cocoa powder has a shelf life of two years.

Unsweetened Chocolate: With no sugar, this is a true baking chocolate. All by itself it is acidic and inedible. Use it melted to flavor an overall recipe (like brownies.) Because there is no sugar in it, you can control the sweetness of your recipe. Mix with semi-sweet chocolate to make your own bittersweet.

Bittersweet Chocolate: Still dark, but a little sweeter than unsweetened; it has a slightly acidic, somewhat nutty flavor with an appealingly sour undertone. Melted, it can flavor an overall recipe; broken into chunks it's great in cookies. Works well with coffee flavor. Bittersweet chocolate has been "discovered" by trendy West Coast Whacko chefs who sniff pretentiously about it's intensity and subtle sweetness. Meanwhile, try some melted and drizzled over a sliced banana.

Semisweet Chocolate: This is classic dark chcolate, and has been the favorite of home bakers for the past fifty years. Distinctively sweet, smooth and nutty, it can be used melted or chunked in any recipe calling for chocolate. Made by many manufacturers in America and Europe, it is readily available at most stores, often in a variety of grades. Skip the morsels, which are formulated to hold their shape at the expense of taste, and use whole bars chopped into chunks for richer melting.

German Chocolate: Somewhere between the sweetness of milk chocolate and semisweet, it has a cool, sweet flavor. It's favored for icings, cakes, and use with nuts. It makes a nice change of pace from semisweet. It's name comes from the name of it's first developer, a man named German and has no connexion with Germany.

Milk Chocolate: Light, sweet, and caramelly. Favored for eating out of hand, and for use in cookie recipes (try combining it with, or using in place of, some of the semisweet chunks next time.) Excellent in oatmeal cookies. And a few ounces grated and added to chocolate chip cookie dough can really liven up an old favorite recipe.

Springfield [MA] Union News, 1/8/97

MM by Dave Sacerdote

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