One of the many things I learned in the the cookbook writing process was how to spell vinaigrette. Its one of those words that looks wrong even when it is right so thank you, eagle-eyed editors. Heres the recipe - it has garlicy, sweet and sour notes which you can adjust by using more or less dark chocolate.2 tablespoons balsamicvinegar2 tablespoons rice winevinegar (or white vinegar)1 ounce dark chocolate,melted2 tablespoons water1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil1 teaspoon minced garlic1 teaspoon kosher saltGround pepper to tastePut all the ingredients into a blender and blend on lowuntil mixed, less than a minute.

Oolong tea from Taiwan infused milk chocolate from Belgium. Dark chocolate from Venezuela drank up black tea from Ceylon. And Napa Valley red wine seeped into organic chocolate from Hawaii. Such exotic flavor and terroir matchups were among the many found at the 55th Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City in June. What inspired these new combinations? Large amounts of flavonols, the antioxidant-powered chemicals that occur naturally in wine, tea and chocolate. Industry watchers predict that health benefits, flavor infusions and global influences will drive a chocolate explosion through 2014. A record number of new chocolate products launched at this trade show reflects an overall increase of 76% since 2006. This means more tasty twists than ever can be found at your gourmet chocolate counter.When we launched Box of Bubbly last year, we were surprised by its instant success, says Ed Engoron, owner and head chocolatier of Choclatique, an online boutique in Los Angeles, about his line of champagne truffles ($20 for a box of eight.) We had to work for the balance that allows you to experience a hint of effervescence. Choclatiques new Napa Valley Collection features fruity reds and bittersweet darks. The chocolate, sourced from beans around the world and refined in its Los Angeles studio, encases a chocolate ganache infused with red wines carefully chosen from the grape-growing region of Californias Napa Valley. We wanted to introduce something special for the crush season of our favorite wines, says Joan Vieweger, Choclatiques co-owner and marketing specialist.Wine Lover's Chocolate Collection, from Bridge Brands in San Francisco, is a selection of dark chocolates to pair with wine, a way for people to experience the subtleties of wine and chocolate together without a lot of guesswork, says the companys website. In the heart of Napa Valley, Anette's Chocolate Factory offers Winter Cabernet Truffle Bar and Merlot Fudge Sauce among its many wine-inspired confections.Studies from medical institutions (Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins among them) confirm that wine, tea and chocolate contribute to heart health, and sales for each have shot up. Good news drives sales, sales drives marketing, and marketing supports new products. Chocolate generates an estimated $80 billion per year for international companies such as Cadbury, Cargill, Nestl, Hersheys and Mars, with dark chocolate sales increasing 49% between 2003 and 2006.Tea, a complex, storied and antioxidant-laden alkaloid, figures in more chocolate bars than ever before. Chicago-based Vosges Haut Chocolat, long a leader in the flavored chocolates trend, now offers an Earl Grey tea and sweet dark chocolate bar. Theo from Portland, Ore., has a chai tea dark chocolate bar. In a further twist, tea makers and vintners are putting chocolate into their drinks, no easy feat given chocolates high fat content (about 50%) and the inherent difficulty in emulsifying with liquids.All this brewing and crazy chemistry result in products ranging from the sublime to the silly. One chocolate drop I tasted gave me such a mouthful of raw green tea powder that I had to delicately remove it and desperately splash down the residue at a nearby passion fruit juice stand. (My palate thanks you, Ceres Fruit Juices!) One confectioner described a product as cabernet-flavored pectin jelly drenched in chocolate, which hints at neither deliciousness nor healthfulness, and tasted like a grape gummy bear dipped in reluctant chocolate.But even in this melee of fusion and confusion, quality products emerge. Harney & Sons, purveyors of fine tea in upstate New York, created a chocolate mint tea that hits the best notes of both. The Tea Room, another chocolate specialist from Californias Napa Valley, won a silver Sofi Award, the Fancy Food Shows award for excellence, for its Green Earl Grey Dark Chocolate bar.Despite the grim economy, the Fancy Food Show drew a record crowd of more than 24,000 buyers and specialty food industry professionals from around the world. Chocolate is a robust category, says Louise Kramer of the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, which produces the Fancy Food Show. While not recession-proof, gourmet chocolate is considered an affordable luxury, and many companies continue to post gains. Attendance at the show was up 4 percent from last year and higher than at any Fancy Food Show in the past decade.VISIT THE NEW SITE "ZESTER DAILY" AT WWW.ZESTERDAILY.COM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CULTURE OF WINE AND FOOD.

Cherry season is almost over - sniff, sniff - so now is the time for all good chocolatiers to honor this exquisite superfruit. Cherries come in sweet and sour varieties, including Bing, Morello, and Schmidt among many others. Historians suspect they are originally from China and first cultivated in Turkey by the Romans in the 1st century. They later captured the adoration of the Chinese brush painters; their blossoms became a national cultural symbol of Japan and many cities (notably Kyoto, Washington DC and Vancouver) incorporate them into their landscape and organize festivals around them.Sweet or tart to create a cherry compote for your chocolate confection? Given that tart cherries are naturally bittersweet (like you-know-what), opt for deep, dark red Morellos or Montmorency, pit em, give them a rough chop and boil them in 1/2 cup of water, 1 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup corn syrup with a pinch of salt and a splash of brandy for 5 minutes or so. While they cool, make a thin shortbread crust, baked very soft. A simple sugar cookie recipe or pate sucre will do - just roll it out to 1/4 on a sheet pan and bake just until light brown on the edges. Next, make a milk chocolate ganache (1 cup melted milk chocolate, 3/4 cup hot cream, a little black pepper; pulse them in the food processor for about 10 seconds). Put a 1/2 layer of ganache over the shortbread, then a thin layer of the cherry compote. Push the cherries into the chocolate ganache so they will stay put. Allow it to set, then slice into 1 squares or circles and enrobe them in dark, 72% chocolate. Top with pink chocolate plastique cherry blossoms. If this all sounds tasty but too much work, visit my on-line store at www.happychocolates.com and Ill send you a batch. Pssst. Either way, buy cherries now and freeze them! Youll thank me in September.

Posted in Chocolate Adventures, All the Time Recipes | Edit | No

The sugar and chocolate showpiece competition at the World Pastry Championship is a place to pick favorites. I pick favorites there the way I might choose giant lollipops at the amusement park - which one speaks to my heart in color and design. But heres the trick that sets the sugar artists of the pastry championship miles apart from the guys in the candy kitchen making giant lollipops. Sugar artists must make their sculptures tall. Not just big, but gravity-defyingly tall. Next, they must make its colors so luminous and harmoniously blended that you recognize the object as something worthy of a museum or a sugar art gallery (if only there was one). Unlike bronze, stained glass or canvas where youd expect exquisite color and form meaningfully rendered together, sugar melts in heat and humidity. Sugar breaks. Sugar shatters. Sugar buckles under extreme weight. Creating a brilliantly colored and shaped sugar piece that is also tall and sturdy is the high-wire act these artists must perform. As if thats not enough, they have to do the same dazzling work in chocolate. What a show!For more photos of the sugar artists and their sculptures, visit www.pastrychampionship.com or order the next issue of Dessert Professional Magazine www.dessertprofessional.com

Rambling through the cheese section of the new Whole Foods market in Pasadena is an excerise in delerium. Should I get the sharp farmhouse cheddar I know? Should I try the oozy sheeps milk raw Ive never heard of? Blue with veins or white with orange rind??? Then, the little cheese that was meant for me appeared. Cardona with a cocoa powder rind. What a miracle of subtely - no sharpness to the flavor of the cheese, no bitterness from the wrapping of the cocoa. Richness all around. How did they do that?? Thank you, my new friends at Carr Valley. For great scoop on cheese, visit Culture Magazine at www.culturecheesemag.com

Imagine your very own chocolate workshop - shelf space for all your molds, spatulas, pots, pans and junk; room for all your machines which nobody loves but you; boxes and boxes of your fine couvertures from around the world. What is the one thing you need to make your vision complete?You need a marble slab! I am the proud owner of a new marble slab which now lives in my state-of-the-art-on-a-twizzlestick-budget chocolate studio formerly known as.my basement. Here I can store all my chocolate gear, develop new recipes, make chocolate decorations and tinker with the gadgets of artistry: molds, bands, transfer sheets, paint sprayers, flower cutters, leaf veiners, exacto knives. Endless fun. From here, I cart the new ideas & designs to my co-op commercial kitchen for production, which is now a heck of a lot more efficient. In the words of Virginia Woolf, I have a room of ones own. Shopping for marble? I considered granite and marble and started pricing pieces from the usual suspects: Home Depot and Costco. You can beat those prices! I wound up in the stone works district of Los Angeles which is in North Hollywood (who knew?). This big boy pictured above cost me $400 with no delivery (borrowed my friend Garys truck and also my friend Gary to help carry the damn thing) which is 1/4 of the price Home Depot quoted me. Dont get me wrong, I love my peeps at Home Depot but these shiny slabs require some muscular shopping. I hear you get good deals at the graveyard but I had to draw the line! Granite is a little cheaper than marble; both natural stones are pourous so you have to use some caution with food colors and cleansers, but I chose marble because of this wonderfully clean color (against which all chocolate is easily visible) and its long history as the cool, clean favorite of confectioners.

Today I joined 40 other chocolatiers - bayside with seagulls - thinking: this is a perfect day for chocolate lovers in San Fran to collect at the waterfront wharf and celebrate chocolate. Look out! 5,000 of them turned up! I was next to Chocolatique from LA, Jade from SF, Amano from Utah, William Dean from Florida, and nearly 20 wine and liqueur makers, 20 artists....and thousands of enthusiasts sampling the wares. My observatons: chocolate is still recession-proof! People were buying, chocolate was selling. New products: it's all about the bean: chocolate-enriobed beans, chocolate-covered nibs, raw, roasted....lots and lots of beans. Also, spicy chocolate is still in - chipotle chili, wasabi, ginger top the list. Caramel and toffee...decidedly old-fashioned flavors... lit up the eyes of many SF foodies when they appeared on our menus. Even so, most attendees were looking for daring spices and innovation. Who will win the best in show? What did the bloggers have to say about the event? Was there a definitive chocolate photo of the day?? More will be revealed at www.tastetv.com.

The swirling snow through Chicagos bare trees seemed a long way from the humid breezes and thick leaf canopies of chocolates growing regions. Yet when I arrived at the new Barry-Callebauts Chocolate Academy in Chicago, I found the fragrant bags of chocolate from Costa Rica and Tanzania and Mexico ready for action. I had heard that this facility was the best of all chocolate work labs in the country, and maybe even the world. Could it be true? This was no ordinary candy kitchen - the kind with a greasy copper kettle and a few cracked marble slabs around. And it was not quaint in the way you imagine a storied kitchen of a European boutique. No, this was a long, well-lit room with a state-of-the-art granite workspace the size of a basketball court (OK, I exaggerate, but you chocolate people have spent plenty of time in the corner of a too-hot kitchen with nothing more than a bowl and a broken tempering machine. Youd love this! It was huge!). We had induction burners, ganache frames, guitars, temperature and humidity control, sunshades, convection ovens, Robot-Coupes, heat guns, pallette knives and a wall of chocolate from which to choose our flavors. We worked with automatic enrobers, continuous enrobers, chocolate warmers, molds, racks and pans all specified to the precise needs of chocolate practioners. If you could take your eyes off all this gleaming equipment, you could ponder the views of Chicagos snowy rooftops and river traffic below. My chef/instructor, Derek Pho, is also the technical director for Barry-Callebaut, and he chose most of the equipment in the place. Ask him anything about the Chicago facility, water activity in ganache, sugar density, the Canadian facility, beta crystalsyou name it, this guy knows it. Plus he can explain it to you in any of the 6 languages he speaks. My chocolate biz & tech skills got a work out, my pastry chef skills got a work out, my student skills got a big work out becuase we were given lectures, hand-outs and detailed chemistry information along with our confectionary recipes. But now I have a problem. My tabletop tempering machines look like old vacuum cleaners to me now. Im just not living right. I need one of those $25,000 enrobers and a basketball court full of granite in my workspace. My aspirations may have a big price tag, but the inspiration from the Chocolate Academy was priceless. http://www.barry-callebaut.com/chocolate_academy or 866-443-0437