[.ca] Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate (ISBN 1579651607)

From Amazon.com:
In Bittersweet, Alice Medrich continues her mouthwatering crusade to educate chocoholics everywhere about her passion. With 30 years experience, first at her famous Berkeley bakery, Cocolat, and then as an award-winning cookbook author, there is little Medrich doesn't know about chocolate. And what sets this book apart from all others is her willingness to share what's she's learned. As the American palate has changed, and we've learned to appreciate better quality chocolate, more and more of it is has become available to us. These premium chocolates come labeled with their percentage of cocoa solids. This delectable book is made practically foolproof thanks to the "chocolate notes" that follow any recipe where the percentage would affect the outcome. In them, Medrich provides equivalencies which allow you to use your favorite chocolate, and tweak the recipe to make it work. She's brutally honest, too, so when she says you can't mess up the rich and magnificent Queen of Sheba cake, or the Cold Creamy Truffles that started her love affair with chocolate, believe her. And when she warns that there are possible pitfalls for novices when attempting Extra Bittersweet Ganache Truffles, read carefully. The vast majority of her recipes, mostly sweet, some savory, are quite simple; her instructions are painstaking and reassuring; and the tales with which she introduces each chapter are enchanting. So dive into Warm Bittersweet Mousse, White Chocolate Ice Cream, Raspberry-Laced Chocolate Cake, or Chocolate-Flecked Cocoa Soufflés, because doing the dirty work has never been so delicious! --Leora Y. Bloom

chocolate delights:
On the whole, this is a lovely, reliable book with many truly excellent recipes for chocolate and its associates. I have found the 'lightened' desserts (especially chocolate pound cake and 'deception' which i prefer with milk instead of water) and cacao nib recipes (especially ice cream, nibby pecan cookies and cocoa bean cream) to be particularly good. The light recipes do not taste like they are light, which is very unusual and impressive. My only significant disappointments so far have been the various mousses. Also, the author and I just seem to have different preferences when it comes to some things-- e.g. she seems to favor drier, eggier sponge and genoise type cakes which I don't care for (but this is a matter of taste). There are enough photographs to be useful and wet the appetite, though the photo-greedy among us will always want more, especially in comparison with her earlier, glossier books. This book is billed as a memoir in addition to cookbook, but i find it to be lacking on this score. The anecdotes are relatively truncated and scattered, not well suited to sustained armchair reading. Also, I often find the tone irritating-- a combination of patronizing and self-congratulatory embedded in faux modesty. However, there is a lot of very useful information in this book, gleaned from a lifetime of practice and testing. Some of it is embedded in recipe notes, however (e.g. cold eggs can make a (not creamed) cake more tender). The organization of the book is not ideal either for learning or finding recipes, but there is a good index. I find I use the book most for its generally reliable and frequently exceptional recipes, and appreciate the tips and skills I acquire in the process of baking from it.

Pick and Choose:
This book didn't really speak to me. I was disappointed with the amount of photos and boring commentary in much of the text. The chapter on the social influence of chocolate was a total snooze for me, but other readers may like it.Many of the chapter catagories were bland with mediocre recipes. As far as the cocoa nibs...I say, who cares.Out of the 90 or so recipes, I saw only 19 that looked interesting. On a brighter note, some of the aforementioned recipes were really astounding though. I have been looking for a milk chocolate recipe for ice-cream forever and this book delivers.The information on truffles has never been covered before with such depth and was greatly appreciated. If you want to have more technical knowledge on the workings of chocolate, then this book might be useful to own-otherwise, I suggest borrowing it from the library.

For serious chocophiles more than casual bakers:
This book is an unusual mix of biography and cookbook. How useful or entertaining it will be to you depends on what you're looking for. Alice Medrich is undoubtedly one of the pioneers of the chocolate revolution which is elevating Americans' palates away from mass-produced factory chocolates and toward the kind of diversity and quality we began to see with wines a couple of decades ago. "Bittersweet" tells the story of the author's role in that, from her first discovery of chocolate as a child to the chocolate czarina she is today. The heavy admixture of the author's life story means that there's a lot more of the first-person pronoun than is usual in most cookbooks. If what you're looking for is a comprehensive chocolate cookbook, you may find this title a little heavy on extraneous personal information and a little light on photos. As is becoming the trend in chocolate cooking, the recipes here range far beyond desserts, and include entrees (chopped chicken livers with sherry-cocoa pan sauce, for example), soups, salads, and the like. Most of the emphasis, however, is on baking, mousses, soufflés, and the rest. A generous "Before You Begin" section includes useful notes on buying, storing, and melting chocolate, tools of the trade, and other relevant information. "Chocolate Notes" accompanying most recipes offer additional tips and variations. Personally, I didn't know that Alice Medrich was, in the dust jacket's breathless description, "synonymous with chocolate." And so I found the biographic sections somewhat less than compelling. But her expertise is hard to deny, and the recipes themselves are interesting and frequently tantalizing. This may not be the best cookbook for picking up and browsing through. But for chocophiles interested in learning more about one of the celebrities of the gourmet chocolate world, I'm sure there's more than enough here to whet your appetite.

Chocolate Perfection:
What a book this is - I've made several recipes (cookies, brownies, a cake, and easy, do-ahead individual chocolate souffles), none difficult, all stand-out fabulous. The key is access to high quality chocolate - my local grocery store now carries Scharffen Berger - because these recipes are designed to let it shine through. Obviously carefully researched and written, this book has high quality recipes (most important!) as well as detailed background information. Great fun - I'm very pleased with this purchase.

An original denizen of Berkeleyýs Gourmet Ghetto:
There's a small area, not more than 2+ blocks, in North Berkeley that years ago someone - perhaps Herb Caen - dubbed The Gourmet Ghetto. Clustered around centrally located Chez Panisse Restaurant are many small stores and purveyors of specialty items, and these stores have become iconic, synonymous with Good Quality Food. They began in the 70s with The Cheese Board, Bruce Aidell's Poulet, Pig by the Tail, and of course Alice Medrich's Cocolat, dangerously close to Black Oak, a terrific bookstore. During an era when most of us knew nothing more about chocolate than whether our preferences ran to milk chocolate or dark chocolate, when Hershey's ruled the chocolate-loving country, Medrich opened the eyes of the small nation of Berkeley, CA, to the eye-popping and palate-pleasing enchantments of Really Good Chocolate. French, Belgian, Swiss, German...and we all said Wow! More, please! In Bittersweet, Medrich acknowledges that we, her devotees, have grown up in our taste appreciation, so these recipes offer sophisticated (but definitely not daunting) information about cocoa bean content and such things that alter the outcome - how one can 'play' with the composition of different chocolates to achieve a desired result. Those of us who drifted into her store on Shattuck Ave. all those many years ago can now create some of those memories of yesteryear right in our own kitchens. Superb addition to the library of a serious and sophisticated chocoholic.