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Our Top Ten Chocolate Books
10
Apr
Apr
If you’re a true chocoholic you’ve no doubt got a few chocolate books in your collection. These days there are lots of fantastic chocolate books available, including recipe books, historical books, chocolate making manuals and books about chocolate ethics. If you’d like to learn more about this incredible food, these are our top ten recommended books…
- Making Chocolate by Dandelion Chocolate (Masonis, D’Allesandre, Vega & Gore)
From nationally-lauded San Francisco chocolate maker, Dandelion Chocolate, comes the first ever complete guide to making chocolate from scratch. From the simplest techniques and technology—like hair dryers to rolling pins—to the science and mechanics of making chocolate from bean to bar, Making Chocolate holds everything the founders and makers behind San Francisco’s beloved chocolate factory have learned since the day they first cracked open a cocoa bean.
Published 2017
2. Casa Cacao: The Return Trip to the Origin of Chocolate by Jordi Roca and Ignacio Medina
Jordi Roca is currently one of the world’s most advanced chocolatiers, and was proclaimed best pastry chef in the world in the 2014, 50 Best Awards. This book shows Jordi’s search for the origins of cocoa and his journey to discover how to master chocolate for the creation of new, totally revolutionary desserts. He travels through cocoa fields in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador to meet producers both in the interior of the jungle and in the new areas that produce some of the most prestigious cocoa on the market. He learns about the nature of the so-called creole cacao, native to the Amazon rainforest, the characteristics of the crop and the way in which the cocoa cob ends up being transformed into the fermented and dry bean from which we obtain our chocolate. With this background, Jordi returns to his chocolate workshop in Girona and gives a new twist to his creative work, undertaking unique creations with the cocoas that he has collected over the course of his travels through the different countries of Latin America.
The book includes 40 recipes, formulas and totally new creative ideas with cocoa as the mainstay of desserts, chocolates and ice cream.
Published 2019
- Bean-to-bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution by Megan Giller
Author Megan Giller invites fellow chocoholics on a fascinating journey through America’s craft chocolate revolution. Learn what to look for in a craft chocolate bar and how to successfully pair chocolate with coffee, beer, spirits, cheese, or bread. This comprehensive celebration of chocolate busts some popular myths (like “white chocolate isn’t chocolate”) and introduces you to more than a dozen of the hottest artisanal chocolate makers in the US today. You’ll get a taste for the chocolate-making process and understand how chocolate’s flavour depends on where the cacao was grown — then discover how to turn your artisanal bars into unexpected treats with 22 recipes from master chefs.
Published 2017
- From Bean to Bar: A Chocolate Lover’s Guide to Britain by Andrew Baker
Chocolate arouses greater passion in its fans than any other food, and chocolate-making is one of the most exciting and dynamic areas in Britain’s burgeoning artisan food scene. This book is a celebration of chocolate-making, designed to locate and bring to a wider audience the fascinating people making good chocolate in the right way. Arranged geographically in a dozen regional chapters, each one is centred on a local hero but also casts light on other chocolatiers and bean-to-bar makers in their area. A profile of the area and its most characterful artisans is backed up in each chapter by a locator map and data on transport links, supplier websites, and other foodie points of interest. Part travelogue and part biography, always informative and entertaining, there will be practical information that readers can use to make their way around Britain, tasting as they go, or to order lovely chocolate from their armchair while reading about the people who make it. Among the people and places to be included are Duffy Sheardown, a former Formula One racing engineer who makes bars of chocolate in a shed in Cleethorpes that are prized by chocolate connoisseurs all over the world; Willie Harcourt-Cooze, a glamorous globetrotter who grows cocoa in Venezuala and makes chocolate in Uffculme, Devon (sold in Waitrose); and the passionate young women of Dormouse, who from tiny premises in Manchester are winning international accolades.
Published 2020
- Cocoa by Kristy Leissle
Chocolate has long been a favourite indulgence. But behind every chocolate bar we unwrap, there is a world of power struggles and political manoeuvring over its most important ingredient: cocoa.
In this incisive book, Kristy Leissle reveals how cocoa, which brings pleasure and wealth to relatively few, depends upon an extensive global trade system that exploits the labour of five million growers, as well as countless other workers and vulnerable groups. The reality of this dramatic inequity, she explains, is often masked by the social, cultural, emotional, and economic values humans have placed upon cocoa from its earliest cultivation in Mesoamerica to the present day. Tracing the cocoa value chain from farms in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, through to chocolate factories in Europe and North America, Leissle shows how cocoa has been used as a political tool to wield power over others. Cocoa’s politicisation is not, however, limitless: it happens within botanical parameters set by the crop itself, and the material reality of its transport, storage, and manufacture into chocolate. As calls for justice in the industry have grown louder, Leissle reveals the possibilities for and constraints upon realising a truly sustainable and fulfilling livelihood for cocoa growers, and for keeping the world full of chocolate.
Published 2018
- A True History of Chocolate by Sophie D.Coe & Michael D. Coe
This delightful tale of one of the world’s favourite foods draws on botany, archaeology, and culinary history to present a complete and accurate history of chocolate. It begins some 4,000 years ago in the jungles of Mexico and Central America with the chocolate tree, Theobroma Cacao, and the complex processes necessary to transform its bitter seeds into what is now known as chocolate. This was centuries before chocolate was consumed in generally unsweetened liquid form and used as currency by the Maya and the Aztecs after them. The Spanish conquest of Central America introduced chocolate to Europe, where it first became the drink of kings and aristocrats and then was popularised in coffeehouses. Industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made chocolate available to all, and now, in our own time, it has become once again a luxury item.
Published 2013
- Raising the Bar: The Future of Fine Chocolate by Pam Williams & Jim Eber
“Just give me all your chocolate and no one gets hurt!” Billions of us worldwide understand what it means to scream those words. We feel lost-even unhinged-without chocolate’s pleasures. And if chocolate is the music that makes our days brighter, fine chocolate is the symphony-the richest, most complex form in the chocolate universe. The most important movement in that symphony’s centuries-old existence is now beginning. And that future is… what? A world of grey monochromatic flavour, or one rich with a rainbow of flavours that capture the myriad pleasures and diversity of the cocoa bean? In the spirit of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Raising the Bar: The Future of Fine Chocolate tells the story of what that next movement in the fine flavour chocolate symphony might hold. Told in four lively parts covering everything from before the bean to after the bar-genetics, farming, manufacturing, and bonbons-the book features interviews with dozens of international stakeholders across the fine flavour industry to consider the promises and pitfalls ahead. It looks through what is happening today to understand where things are going, while unwrapping the possibilities for the millions and millions of us who believe that life without the very best chocolate is no life at all.
Published 2019
- The Art & Craft of Chocolate by Nathan Hodge (Raaka Chocolate)
In The Art and Craft of Chocolate, world-renowned chocolate maker Nathan Hodge takes you on a grand tour of chocolate—from its processing, history, and trade to how it’s made, bean to bar. The book includes the basic principles of chocolate-making at home and recipes for traditional moles, drinks, baked goods, rubs, and more.
The Art and Craft of Chocolate opens with the very basics, beginning with the cacao tree, and explains the process of growing cacao and the many hands it takes to process it. For centuries, chocolate has been used for many purposes all over the world: from a currency during the Mayan empire, to homemade beverages consumed by farm workers in Central America for energy, as well as in moles and other dishes in Mexican cuisine. The Art and Craft of Chocolate covers the cultural history of chocolate, as well as the birth of the chocolate bar.
The co-founder and head chocolate maker of Raaka Chocolate, Nathan Hodge, then shows you how to hack the basic principles of chocolate-making at home using tools as simple as a food processor, a hair dryer, and a double boiler. In addition, he offers recipes for traditional moles from different regions of Mexico; traditional Mayan chocolate drinks; cocoa as a meat rub; and various baked goods.
Published 2018
Chocolate – the very word conjures up a hint of the forbidden and a taste of the decadent. Yet the story behind the chocolate bar is rarely one of luxury.
From the thousands of children who work on plantations to the smallholders who harvest the beans, Chocolate Nations reveals the hard economic realities of our favourite sweet. This vivid and gripping exploration of the reasons behind farmer poverty includes the human stories of the producers and traders at the heart of the West African industry. Orla Ryan shows that only a tiny fraction of the cash we pay for a chocolate bar actually makes it back to the farmers, and sheds light on what Fair Trade really means on the ground.
Provocative and eye-opening, Chocolate Nations exposes the true story of how the treat we love makes it onto our supermarket shelves.
Published 2012
- The New Taste of Chocolate by Maricel E. Presilla
More than two hundred years ago, the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus christened the cacao tree Theobroma cacao, “food-of-the-gods cacao.” Truly, chocolate is the closest thing we mortals have to ambrosia. But not all chocolate is created equal, a fact we instinctively know when we bite into an exceptional piece of chocolate. What qualities set artisanal chocolate apart from mass-marketed brands? How does chocolate impact our health? How will the rising popularity of microbatch chocolate affect the industry? To find out, The New Taste of Chocolate, Revised takes us on a journey beginning with Maya and Aztec chocolate rituals, followed by exploring the significance of cacao through the ages, up through groundbreaking contemporary genetic discoveries.
Published 2009
