Jacques Torres spills the beans on how to bake with chocolate like a pro.
As summer memories fade and the leaves begin to fall, the holiday baking season is almost here. It’s now time to dust off all those holiday baking recipes and get ready to make some festive sweets.
Of course, one of the biggest flavors of the season is chocolate, so who better than Jacques Torres—aka Mr. Chocolate—to help us prepare?
The award-winning French pastry chef, chocolatier, TV host, cookbook author and former head judge of Netflix’s Nailed It! is a master of his craft and the ultimate culinary multi-hyphenate. In an interview with Taste of Home, Jacques revealed his top tips to have you working with chocolate like a pro.
Know Your Chocolate
According to Jacques, the key to successfully baking with chocolate is to educate yourself about chocolate—what it is and how it’s made—to ensure that you know what you’re working with, and what makes a higher-quality chocolate different from a lower-quality one. Don’t use milk chocolate, for example, in a recipe that calls for bittersweet chocolate because these are entirely different chocolates that behave differently when baked.
In addition, be sure to use premium chocolate—made with cocoa butter—instead of chocolate made with vegetable oil whenever possible. According to Jacques, you’ll be able to taste the difference.
“You cannot make a good dessert with bad ingredients, unfortunately,” Jacques added.
Learn How to Melt Chocolate Properly
When it comes to melting chocolate, Jacques is an advocate for using the microwave. The double-boiler method, by comparison, runs the risk of water coming into contact with your chocolate, which can cause it to seize up.
Using a microwave to melt chocolate will keep your chocolate dry, though you’ll need to remember to stir it every 30 seconds to keep it from burning, Jacques said.
Get Comfortable Tempering Chocolate
Tempering your chocolate is essential when making any molded chocolate treat. This process will allow it to retract from your mold, and skipping it will make removing the chocolate from the mold very tricky.
“Tempering is not a choice,” Jacques said. “If you mold chocolate, chocolate needs to be tempered. It can be intimidating, but it’s actually very simple.”
Be Careful with Chocolate Storage
Jacques pointed out that because chocolate contains both sugar and fat, it is (unfortunately) excellent at absorbing any flavors that are around it—something that can be easy to forget.
“If you put a piece of chocolate in the fridge next to an onion, then you’re going to have onion chocolates,” he said.
Keep It Simple
Jacques also passed along what he called the best baking advice he’d ever himself received: to not overcomplicate your baking. Focus instead on using the best ingredients possible and sticking to recipes that don’t have too many competing flavors.
“If you do a dessert with 10 different flavors, you’re not going to have one flavor coming through,” Jacques said.
Don’t Be Intimidated
Finally, Mr. Chocolate offered a word of advice for bakers just getting started working with chocolate: Don’t be afraid to fail. If you just keep at it, odds are that your next attempt at the perfect chocolate dessert will be better than the last ones.
“If you fail at chocolate, it’s easy. You can melt it again and do it again, no problem,” Jacques said. “So don’t let a piece of chocolate intimidate you. You’re the boss in the kitchen, not the chocolate.”
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