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Summary: A real pleasure, both to read and to bake from...
Review: Alice Medrich opened her first Cocolat shop when I was an impoverished undergraduate at Berkeley in the mid-1970s. I learned an important lesson from her: Since even the poorest student could buy a single Cocolat truffle, just that one truffle, made with care from superior ingredients, would delight, satiate, and inspire in a way that a bag of M&Ms never could."Bittersweet" offers bakers (at any level of expertise) enticing new ingredients and technique that go into the creation of memorable chocolate desserts. She revisits old favorites, such as brownies, and offers variations; in my opinion, the Lacy Coconut-Topped Brownies alone are worth the price of the book. Mousse also gets the Medrich treatment, including a very successful variation that can be whipped up completely dairy-free, if desired. Medrich also suggests some surprising ways to incorporate unsweetened chocolate into savory dishes, such as an astonishingly delicious Italian dolce-forte ("sweet and strong") meat sauce for pasta. This is a fun book to read, which can't always be said of a cookbook, and the photographs are stunning. Memoirs are currently all the rage in the publishing industry, but here's one that doesn't leave the reader with a raging case of indigestion. Though many people consider Alice Medrich to be America's reigning chocolate queen, she isn't the one telling you so. In this unpretentious, informative book, her desire to share the joy of a bittersweet-chocolate moment shines through on every page.
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Summary: "Tales" not on par with "Recipes"
Review: Alice Medrich proves her unparalleled expertise and unmatched resourcefulness with both sweet and savory - the dessert category and the entrée category - in this, her most ambitious book in many years. Since her youthful career start in 1974, Alice has hardly remained a mere specialty cake-maker over the last thirty years. While a decade ago her revision of several chapters in everyone's home bible - The All-New Joy of Cooking - was plentiful enough evidence of her versatile talents, this blockbuster showcases her breadth of creativity in clarifying the latest trends and taking them the next step. Those who have followed Alice's career know she can be wildly successful in anything culinary she sets out to do, and this volume gives fresh currency to her long-established unrivaled reputation. Like others commenting in these columns, the biographies of culinary legends are as fascinating to me as their recipes. In this respect, Alice's "Tales from a Life in Chocolate" fall short of the explicitness of her recipes. Little is added to the snapshots of early career highlights repetitively recounted in earlier books and interviews. Glimpses into her ensuing professional and personal trajectory take a tone that at first seems gracefully modest but ultimately feels distancing and condescending - in a coy "if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're not in the know" fashion. What happened to the barely-mentioned husband who "provided the most critical support" to her famous business, Cocolat? Half-way through the pages, he disappears - without even a few words of explanation, the reader is teased but shorted. And who are the "we" repeatedly referenced in the episodes of career trial and triumph? Alice can well afford to be more generous in acknowledging former employees and colleagues (many of whom have respectable culinary or allied careers of their own). Her reticence imparts an acidic taste of stinginess - for a woman of such evident accomplishments, it's puzzling to leave such an impression of either insecurity or disdain. No doubt Alice's life has ample substance for a really compelling memoir or collection of tales - but this first effort falls disappointingly short. We can await with anticipation her next, hopefully even better, productions.
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Summary: Creating singularly memorable desserts
Review: Bitter Sweet: Recipes And Tales From A Life In Chocolate is far more than a run-of-the-mill chocolate-themed recipe book, even though it does feature 150 mouth-watering, easy-to-prepare chocolate treats. Bittersweet also showcases chocolate expert Alice Medrich's skills and experiences as the owner of the California pastry shop "Cocolat" in the fine art and joyous craft of preparing chocolate. Anecdotes and remembrances aplenty pepper the explicit instructions for creating singularly memorable desserts which range from Homemade Chocolate Chunks; Classic Ganache Truffles; Sarah Bernhardt Chocolate Glaze; and Marble Cheesecake; to Bittersweet Hot Fudge Sauce; Buckwheat Cocoa Crepes with Honey; Sicilian Chocolate Gelato; and Black-Bottom Pecan Praline Bars. No dedicated chocolate lover's cookbook collection can be considered complete without the addition of Alice Medrich's Bittersweet.
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Summary: A lovely gift presentation
Review: Bittersweet by Alice Medrich offers the wisdom of thirty years of thinking about and working with chocolate. Bittersweet blends a memoir with a virtual treasure trove of ideas on working with chocolate and using new chocolates successfully in most recipes, includes a primer of terms and ingredients, and is especially invaluable in its troubleshooting sections on what to do with finicky chocolate recipe problems. A lovely gift presentation, Bittersweet is very highly recommended -- as much for its appealing descriptions and insights as for its recipes.
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Summary: For chocolate lovers, simply the best cookbook in years.
Review: I've made many of Alice Medrich's recipes from her previous books, and none of them has ever disappointed. But this book is a standout. It is not at all just a collection of recipes; it actually has the ability to change the way cooks look at and use chocolate. The theme of the book is that, over the past decades, most American cookbooks dealing with chocolate have been written assuming that the home cook is using typical supermarket chocolate, which may be servicable, but which is undistinguished. In the past few years, though, superior chocolates have become very widely available, chocolates with complexity and sophistication. Past recipes, with their heavy reliance on added sugar, fats, and flavorings, may work for less remarkable chocolates. But these recipes may overwhem and mask the unique characteristics of a finer chocolate. Assuming the home cook is using such a fine chocolate, Ms. Medrich analyzes and reconstructs many traditional recipes, and creates new ones as well, with an eye towards showcasing fine chocolate's personality rather than muting it. The recipes are incredible just to read (the half-dozen I've made myself so far have been easy to construct and superb to eat). Ms. Medrich's attention to detail is, as always, excellent; most of the recipes even includes notes describing how to adjust for chocolates with varying percentages of chocolate liquor. (If you're baking with a 60% chocolate bar, for instance, you'd use different quantities of added sugar and fat than you'd use if baking with a 72% chocolate.) Medrich also offers detailed explanations of the origins and philosophy behind certain dishes (mousse, for instance, or truffles). She devotes a large section of the book to the use of, and recipes for, roasted cocoa nibs. I've never before seen a book treat them as a serious ingredient in their own right. There is also a wonderfully broad selection of recipes that utilize chocolate in savory dishes and entrees...miles beyond Chicken Mole. Aesthetically, Bittersweet is elegantly designed and contains a decent number of color photographs (I crave more, though). For chocoholics, this book really is an eye-opener. Unreseveredly recommended.
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Summary: First Rate Explanation of Chocolate Mysteries and Recipes
Review: No one should try to do any serious work with chocolate without reading this book or another equally good book on the subject. One of the first things you learn in this book is that there are as many, if not more subtleties and ambiguities in the marketing of chocolate as there are in just about any other basic food product such as flour or olive oil. On this matter, I am slightly concerned that Ms. Medrich, in an otherwise superb book, does not simply drop all vagueness in chocolate labeling and go with products which are boldly labeled by percentage of chocolate liqueur to sugar. My guess is that while very high-end (expensive) product lines such as Vahlrona do this kind of labeling, more commonly available product lines do not do it. But then, we still wouldn't have leeks and shallots or organic products in our grocery stores if people such as Julia Child and Alice Waters hadn't started making a fuss about it. But I digress. Another regret I get from reading this book has nothing to do with the quality of Ms. Medrich work. It is the fact that the great American chocolate producer Hershey has so little to contribute to those of us who wish to bake with high quality chocolate. The significance of the book's title is that bittersweet chocolate is the most commonly used form of chocolate for baking. This brings up another issue with chocolate cooking. Unlike white wheat flour, a relatively simple product, chocolate used for baking, that is, bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, is a rather complex product, being an emulsion of solids in an oil, cocoa butter. This means that the general warning about following procedures exactly becomes even more important. Another subtlety in chocolate products is the formulation of chocolate chips used in Toll House cookies. It would seem so easy to zip open a bag of chocolate chips and melt them instead of chopping down a block of semisweet with a knife. The problem is that those little chocolate chips are specially formulated to not melt like normal chocolate so they hold their shape in cookies. Melting them like conventional chocolate will just give you a mess. The most important warning one can take away from this book about chocolate products is the difference between conventional cocoa powder and Dutch Process cocoa powder. On the face of it, removing some bitterness from cocoa through the Dutch Process may seem like a good thing. But, the author points out that the process acts like a filter on music which removes all the high notes, so you end up with a less interesting flavor. Also, since there is a big difference in pH between conventional and Dutch Process, you cannot substitute one for the other safely if your recipe includes baking soda or baking powder. The stories about the problems with melting chocolate probably outnumber all other calls for culinary advice. The stuff is finicky in the extreme. The irony is that the properties which make it finicky around heat are the same things which give it such a lush and rich mouth feel. That is, since cocoa butter melts at human body temperature, it will melt and be on its way to being scorched long before other products such as butter or olive oil even start to be ready to cook. Ms. Medrich gives excellent guidance for this most basic operation on chocolate by describing the three most successful methods for melting chocolate, the water bath, the double boiler, and the microwave oven. Medrich even succeeds in describing the difference between a water bath and a double boiler and the advantages of the former in a manner much clearer and more illuminating than the great Jeremiah Tower, who seemed to become especially tongue tied over the matter. Ms. Medrich covers a wide range of chocolate preparations including Ice Cream and Brownies, Tortes, Truffles and Mousses, Souffles, Cakes and Glazes, Cookies, and selected savory dishes. The book ends with several useful appendices on recognizing the various types of chocolate and their use. It is probably a virtue that this book often repeats the same information in two or three different contexts. This can only be to the good, especially for the spelunker who dips into selected chapters rather than reading the whole book. I definitely recommend that if you are really interested in working with chocolate, you read the whole book. Ms. Medrich's biographical anecdotes are both entertain and inform us about how she came about some of her successes with chocolate. Highly recommended.
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Summary: chocolate delights
Review: On the whole, this is a lovely, reliable book with many truly excellent recipes for chocolate and its associates. I have found the 'lightened' desserts (especially chocolate pound cake and 'deception' which i prefer with milk instead of water) and cacao nib recipes (especially ice cream, nibby pecan cookies and cocoa bean cream) to be particularly good. The light recipes do not taste like they are light, which is very unusual and impressive. My only significant disappointments so far have been the various mousses. Also, the author and I just seem to have different preferences when it comes to some things-- e.g. she seems to favor drier, eggier sponge and genoise type cakes which I don't care for (but this is a matter of taste). There are enough photographs to be useful and wet the appetite, though the photo-greedy among us will always want more, especially in comparison with her earlier, glossier books. This book is billed as a memoir in addition to cookbook, but i find it to be lacking on this score. The anecdotes are relatively truncated and scattered, not well suited to sustained armchair reading. Also, I often find the tone irritating-- a combination of patronizing and self-congratulatory embedded in faux modesty. However, there is a lot of very useful information in this book, gleaned from a lifetime of practice and testing. Some of it is embedded in recipe notes, however (e.g. cold eggs can make a (not creamed) cake more tender). The organization of the book is not ideal either for learning or finding recipes, but there is a good index. I find I use the book most for its generally reliable and frequently exceptional recipes, and appreciate the tips and skills I acquire in the process of baking from it.
Rating: 
Summary: Less than expected
Review: Some parts of the book are great. There's a good section on general chocolate topics, ingredients, tools, etc. And the recipes often have notes that are useful to the advanced chocolate user. But, if you like to see an example of what the recipe discusses (i.e. a photo - something that makes a big difference for me) then this book may disapoint you. While the photos are good, they are not placed with the recipes and there are not photos for each recipe. Saving printing costs by avoiding photos and by not placing them with the recipe does the reader a great disservice in this case. Finally, part of the book is more or less a memoir. I found this interesting in some cases and tiresome in others. It was tiresome when it seemed that the author was patting herself on the back a fair bit.
Rating:
Summary: Less than expected
Review: Some parts of the book are great. There's a good section on general chocolate topics, ingredients, tools, etc. And the recipes often have notes that are useful to the advanced chocolate user. But, if you like to see an example of what the recipe discusses (i.e. a photo - something that makes a big difference for me) then this book may disapoint you. While the photos are good, they are not placed with the recipes and there are not photos for each recipe. Saving printing costs by avoiding photos and by not placing them with the recipe does the reader a great disservice in this case. Finally, part of the book is more or less a memoir. I found this interesting in some cases and tiresome in others. It was tiresome when it seemed that the author was patting herself on the back a fair bit.
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Summary: An original denizen of Berkeley¿s Gourmet Ghetto
Review: There's a small area, not more than 2+ blocks, in North Berkeley that years ago someone - perhaps Herb Caen - dubbed The Gourmet Ghetto. Clustered around centrally located Chez Panisse Restaurant are many small stores and purveyors of specialty items, and these stores have become iconic, synonymous with Good Quality Food. They began in the 70s with The Cheese Board, Bruce Aidell's Poulet, Pig by the Tail, and of course Alice Medrich's Cocolat, dangerously close to Black Oak, a terrific bookstore.
During an era when most of us knew nothing more about chocolate than whether our preferences ran to milk chocolate or dark chocolate, when Hershey's ruled the chocolate-loving country, Medrich opened the eyes of the small nation of Berkeley, CA, to the eye-popping and palate-pleasing enchantments of Really Good Chocolate. French, Belgian, Swiss, German...and we all said Wow! More, please!
In Bittersweet, Medrich acknowledges that we, her devotees, have grown up in our taste appreciation, so these recipes offer sophisticated (but definitely not daunting) information about cocoa bean content and such things that alter the outcome - how one can 'play' with the composition of different chocolates to achieve a desired result.
Those of us who drifted into her store on Shattuck Ave. all those many years ago can now create some of those memories of yesteryear right in our own kitchens.
Superb addition to the library of a serious and sophisticated chocoholic.
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