"scharffen berger" news and stories

Many dessert recipes call for chopped chocolate, and there's a simple way to get evenly sized bits without using a chef's knife.

Are you a recipe-creating whiz? Well here's your chance to make $5000 off of it.

Tuttiefoodie and Scharffen Berger have just announced a chocolate recipe contest that sounds positively delicious. The Chocolate Adventure Contest seems like a great way to express your creativity, in this case with Scharffen Berger chocolate and an "adventure ingredient" from their list.

There are three categories (sweet, savory, beverage) and the winner gets $5000 plus a collection of cookbooks and mentions in Saveur magazine, Tuttiefoodie, and Scharffen Berger's e-newsletter. All you need to do is create a recipe using Scharffen Berger chocolate and submit it between October 1, 2008 and January 4, 2009. Check here for rules and details. Get really adventurous and submit up to ten recipes!

Up until yesterday afternoon, my boyfriend and I didn't have much of a New Year's Eve plan. There were options, a couple of different friends were having parties, one of my favorite bars in the whole world was having a no coverage charge evening and some friends had invited us over for pizza (sadly, I didn't actually get the text message with that invite until after we ordered take out sushi), but no hard and fast plan.

While we were having lunch at Marathon Grill at around 3 pm, we stumbled upon what became an integral part of the plan: brownie sundaes. With that idea in place, we ran to the store for ingredients. However, when we got back to my place and I started looking at recipes, I discovered that I had forgotten to by any unsweetened chocolate and I was fresh out (I've been away for two weeks and my memory of my supply inventory has gotten foggy). However, I had a bunch of bittersweet chocolate, some semi-sweet chips and unsweetened cocoa powder and decided to improvise based on a recipe for Triple-Chocolate Fudge Brownies from The Gourmet Cookbook (the big yellow one).

The batter was amazing tasting and so I had high hopes for the brownies. And they were good, but not as amazing as I wanted them to be. However, with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream, they were definitely doable. However, they worked some alchemy last night and when I woke up this morning, they had become the brownies I had hoped for--dense, fudgy and transcendentally chocolate-y. They are worth making, especially if you are able to let them rest for 12-24 hours before digging in.

Fans of Scharffen Berger Chocolates will appreciate this cookbook by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg, the founders of the company. Working with food writer Susie Heller, the pair put together the Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cooking with Fine Chocolate, a cookbook that is devoted to chocolate for those who really appreciate it. Even though Scharffen Berger is now owned by Hershey's, the chocolates are still produced to their original, gourmet specifications and these recipes reflect that attention to detail. The more than 100 recipes are arranged according to their cacao content and, unlike more generic recipes that just call for "milk" or "dark" chocolate, these are specifically tweaked to work best with the individual chocolates called for. This strategy is a good way to sell more chocolate and a bit of a PITA if you aren't really a chocolate connoisseur, but if you already buy your chocolates this way (and many of us do), this cookbook should give you much better than average results and the recipes will require no tweaking. Recipes include White Velvet Cake with Milk Chocolate Ganache, Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes, Chocolate Ginger Pots de Crème and even a couple of savory recipes that primarily use cocoa powder, like Chile Marinated Flank Steak and Vegetarian Chili.

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Just over a year after buying California chocolate maker Scharffen Berger, Hershey's has decided to expand their premium portfolio to include Dagoba, an organic chocolate maker from Oregon. The purchase of the company for an undisclosed amount as announced this week.

Some fans of Dagoba might be concerned that there will be a decrease in the overall quality of the product following the acquisition, or a turn away from the goals of the company in supporting the organic farming of cacao, but Hershey's says that it will strongly support the company in the pursuit of its goals. As with Scharffen Berger and Joseph Schmidt, which are also owned by Hershey, the larger company has no plans to rework the operations of Dagoba. From the perspective of the consumer, the most significant change will be an increase in the availability of organic chocolates, since Dagoba will now be able to take advantage of the Hershey's distribution network.

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