The Cheap Chocolate I Started Buying After Working as a Pastry Chef

I worked as a pastry chef at various times during my career, from wedding cake baker to fine dining dessert maker. If there’s one thing I learned during my tenure, it was the culinary adage, “don’t make a chocolate dessert with chocolate you wouldn’t eat all by itself.”

That’s why when I’m making a dessert that showcases chocolate like molten chocolate cake, mousse, or brownies, I skip the baking aisle and turn my cart toward the candy aisle where better-tasting chocolate bars await. 

Have you seen the number of gourmet chocolate bars in grocery stores these days? There’s no reason to use mediocre baking bars. My go-to in the candy aisle for most of my chocolate desserts is Tony’s Chocolonely 70% dark chocolate.

The Dutch brand makes a variety of specialty bars. I love the dark almond sea salt bar and the pretzel milk chocolate bar for snacking, but for baking the 70% cocoa solid bar delivers a deep (but never bitter) flavor and incredible melt-in-your-mouth texture that makes chocolate desserts sing. 

The 6.35 ounce bars are a bargain for the quality at about 79 cents per ounce. Competition in the baking aisle ranges from $1.50 to $1.60/ounce for chocolate that doesn’t taste nearly as good. That’s an amazing bargain, but that’s not the only reason that Tony’s is my choc of choice.

Tony’s is dedicated to using 100% traceable cocoa beans, engaging in fair trade practices, and working to end exploitative child and/or slave labor practices in the chocolate industry at large. Just peel back the colorful recycled wrapper and you can read more about how the brand is changing an industry for the better. How sweet is that? 

To use bar chocolate in baking recipes, you need to chop the chocolate by hand, and while it’s not my favorite kitchen chore, a sharp serrated knife and some patience yields a pile of chopped chocolate fairly quickly. 

Some recipes call for chocolate chips to save you the trouble of chopping chocolate, but chocolate chips contain stabilizers to help them keep their shape in cookies and bars. Plus, they don’t melt as smoothly as bar chocolate. They also tend to be lesser-quality chocolate than gourmet bars like Tony’s Chocolonely, so I reserve the chips for cookies and bars. 

Then again, I’m just as likely to stir a chopped chocolate bar into my cookies. It melts in satisfyingly irregular puddles of chocolate, and it tastes so much more like the food of the gods. 

Buy: Tony’s Chocolonely 70% Dark Chocolate Bar, $4.99 for 6.35 ounces at Amazon

This article originally published on The Kitchn. See it there: The Cheap Chocolate I Started Buying After Working as a Pastry Chef