Good Chocolate, Pantry Essentials
When it comes to good chocolate, you really do get what you pay for. Economize elsewhere, but buy the best quality chocolate you can possibly afford – it makes an enormous and tangible difference in the taste of your baked goods. But before you throw away that package of chocolate chips in your cupboard, stop to read the ingredients which, at a minimum, will contain ingredients like: sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, milk, artificial and/or natural flavour. In my view, store-bought packaged chocolate chips are way too sweet. And try a couple of chocolate chips on their own – they don’t taste very chocolate-y do they? At our restaurant, and at home, we use Callebaut chocolate (but there are other good-quality baking chocolate companies out there that may even ship to your door). When our 10 lb slab of bittersweet chocolate arrives, we break it into chunks with a flat-head screwdriver and a hammer, and then store in airtight containers. So, OK, your cookies won’t have perfectly-shaped chips, but they will have delicious chunks and streaks that I think looks prettier anyway.