Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger, Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cooking with Fine Chocolate. This is the must-have book. Combines recipes, great photographs, and Robert and John’s own personal narrative about their chocolate and how they came to create it.

Michael Recchiuti et al., Chocolate Obsession: Confections and Treats to Create and Savor. Great recipe book.

Andrew Shotts, Making Artisan Chocolates. One of the most instructive of the chocolate cookbooks, particularly good on tempering.

Alice Medrich, Bittersweet. First-person narrative of the author’s life in chocolate, interspersed with recipes. Excellent user-friendly guide. Includes a chapter on chocolate as a savory ingredient (mole, mushroom ragout, sauces for meat and pasta.)

Maricel Presilla, The New Taste of Chocolate. Useful reference book with recipes.

Culinary Institute of America and Peter Greweling, Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner. A combination culinary school textbook and recipe book (truffles for two hundred). Covers confections in general, not just chocolate.

Bernard W. Minifie, Chocolate, Cocoa, and Confectionery. Out of print: used copies start at $180. The technical bible.

Mort Rosenblum, Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light. A chatty, even gossipy first-person account of many historical and industry topics involving cacao.

Joel Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate. A fascinating history of the business side of American chocolate, focusing on the rivalry between Mars and Hershey.

Michael D'Antonio, Hershey. A non-authorized biography of Milton Snavely Hershey, the American inventor who first applied mechanized production techniques to chocolate manufacturing.

Rowan Jacobsen, Chocolate Unwrapped. The best short guide to the health benefits of dark chocolate, this is the book to read if you want to learn as much as possible on the subject in the fewest number of pages.

Stephen T. Beckett, The Science of Chocolate. This is a shortened version of Beckett’s magnum opus, Industrial Chocolate Manufacture and Use. Still somewhat technical but not formidably so, this version explains the complex chemistry and industrial processes that are applied in the production of chocolate.


MAGAZINE: Cocoaroma is a glossy coffee-table magazine with interesting articles and great ads. www.cocoaroma.com.


WEBSITES

www.chocolatealchemy.com. John in Oregon offers one of the best illustrated guides to the mysteries of chocolate processing. Highly informative, and a good source for both beans and processing equipment.

www.dagobachocolate.com; www.theochocolate.com; www.grenadachocolate.com; www.valrhona.com; www.scharffenberger.com. Shop till you drop with these artisan makers, whose websites have interesting information about cacao as well as about themselves and their products.

www.chocosphere.com. Our favorite online retailer, with a broad selection and some of the best prices.

www.seventypercent.com. A British retailer, this company will ship to the US. Lots of news and information on chocolate worldwide.

www.guittard.com. A high-quality manufacturer interested in working with farmers to develop sources for more and better cacao. Gary Guittard and his son Jesse have personally visited Hawaii on several occasions to work with local cacao growers.

www.hawaiicacao.com. This site is affiliated with UH-CTAHR (universityof Hawaii , College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources). Good technical and botanical info and connections.

www.ecolechocolat.com. Pam Wilmor runs this culinary program for prospective chocolatiers in Vancouver. She’s a fountain of information, as well as a great networker.

www.originalhawaiianchocolatefactory.com. Pam and Bob Cooper’s operation in Kona on the Big Island is the mom-and-pop model that we on Kauai might want to emulate.

www.hawaiitropicalfruitgrowers.org. Join HTFGA, a membership organization dedicated to the needs and interests of Hawaii fruit growers. They will be particularly important for dealing with grown-on-Kauai and made-in-Kauai certification.

www.konachocolatefestival.com. Held every year in March. Usually includes symposium and farm tours as well as confectionary craziness and parties.


CHOCOLATE TERMS

The three main varieties of cacao are Criollo – typically a white bean, rare and most sought after. Generally lower yield but superior in flavor. Fewer polyphenols; known for being more fruity and delicate, used as a flavor bean. Forastero – a dark purple and astringent bean. The most commonly grown, due to its higher yield and greater all-around hardiness. This is a bean known for more robust and earthy flavors. Trinitario – Hybrid of the first two. Colors range depending on specific strain. Has fantastic flavors that are generally a combination of the first two.

Tempering – refers to the crystalline structure the cocoa butter takes depending on temperature. The hard, shiny chocolate you get in bar form has been tempered, which gives it “snap” when you break it, glossy sheen, and a resistance to the discoloration that can result from ingredient separation.

Cacao Liquor – nothing to do with booze, this is the industry term for beans that have been roasted and dried, then ground into a paste. Cacao liquor can include added cocoa butter.

Cacao percentage – another industry term that describes the percentage of (non-alcoholic) cacao liquor in the finished chocolate. The remaining components that make up the edible product may include sugar, lecithin as an emulsifier (smoothener), artificial or real vanilla as a flavoring, and milk powder (in the case of milk chocolate.)

Cocoa nibs – the bits of fermented, dried and roasted cacao bean after the shell has been removed by cracking and winnowing. This is the material that is ground up to produce cacao liquor.