Real Chocolate

by Chantal Coady

In Rococo Real Chocolate Chantal Coady, proprietor of London's exquisite Rococo Chocolates in King's Road presents over 50 groundbreaking and highly unusual recipes that anyone can make at home. Painstakingly tested and illustrated with beautiful, easy-to-follow, step-by-step photographs, the book makes the mysterious art of chocolate accessible to the amateur home enthusiast. Coady is an ardent proponent of what she calls "Real Chocolate" and explains the difference between excellent natural ingredients — the only used in Rococo recipes — and the over-sweetened, fat and additive-laden confections most widely marketed in the world today. Simply put, "Real Chocolate" is chocolate made with only the very finest all-natural ingredients. Fun to make and divine to taste! Recipes will include basics like plain and flavoured ganaches and truffles, decorative chocolate leaves and curls; unusual offerings like chocolate tempura and white chocolate and cardamom pannacotta, and savory recipes like black beans with ginger and cocoa, and chocolate tapenade.

The book is also filled with amazing chocolate lore from irrefutable evidence of chocolate's physical and mental health benefits, to the fact that white chocolate is the closest thing found in nature to human breast milk!

Genres: Food, Cookbooks

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This chocolate cookbook has beautiful color photos, recipes, and a history of chocolate. It has savory recipes (I like the chocolate-vinegar) as well as desserts, and I like knowing that chocolate can also be part of a main dish. Some of the dishes, however, are a little more gourmet than I am comfortable with cooking, but maybe someday . . .

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Owning this book has deepened my love of chocolate, and made me experiment with a food which health experts say is very good for you.

This book is stuffed full of beautiful pictures of chocolate and would be worthwhile as a coffee table style book on that basis alone. Coady is clearly very passionate about chocolate and that comes through on every single page. She explains how chocolate is made, what divides most supermarket type chocolate from 'real' chocolate and presents every step of the process of chocolate - selecting beans, roasting them, mixing in high quality ingredients, tempering and setting chocolate, the 'snap', the texture, the colour... the first half of this book is brilliant for anyone curious about chocolate.

The second half of the book is chock-full of recipes for chocolate that will make you think differently about chocolate being 'just' a sweet. I've made a few recipes from here for savoury dishes and they've all been amazing. There are a few I'm not ready to try yet - I still have to get my head around salted chocolate sushi - but I think just about anyone could find something to try from this book.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful cook book. Unfortunately, the ingredients are such that I probably won't be making any of the recipes here.