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The Chocolate Bible
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The Chocolate Bible (Canada, UK)
By Christian Teubner
Publisher: Viking Penguin
Publication Date: September 1997
ISBN: 0670873713If you want to learn about chocolate, you could do a lot worse than to ask a bunch of Austrian, Swiss, and German pastry chefs. In fact, given the chance, where else would you turn?
The Chocolate Bible, originally published in German in 1996 by Christian Teubner and several colleagues, presents comprehensive instructions for making some of the world's most elegant, delicious, and impressive confections.
It certainly is legitimate to call this a chocolate bible — the 150 recipes include most every classic chocolate cake and dessert, from the Sachertorte and Black Forest Cherry Cake to chocolate mousse and Bavarian cream, and from rum truffles and chocolate eggnog (I can't even imagine how sweet that is!) to over-the-top brownies frosted with a cream ganache and a savory Mexican mole. If you're looking for devil's food cake or chocolate chip cookies, however, this might not be the book for you.
The 600 photographs, many by Mr. Teubner himself, are exceptional. They walk you step-by-step through many processes that would take hundreds of words to describe adequately.
Beyond the recipes, there is a lot of text on the history of chocolate and pastry and candy making, which is interesting — but the publishers seem to have found a translator from the old school, and the writing will not hold everyone's attention.
This is not a book for beginners, but then, I'm not sure exactly how you introduce someone to the complexity and variety of working with chocolate; I haven't run across a baby-step chocolate book yet. This one assumes you have some knowledge of how to work with chocolate as well as how it responds in baking. Many of the recipes also make use of specialized, hard-to-find, sometimes expensive chocolate-making equipment that is not found in the average kitchen. But Teubner is pretty good about offering suggestions on common tools and materials that can substitute. There is also a list of sources for ingredients and supplies in the back of the book; I wish it were more comprehensive — and also that it referenced Web sites that offer these products, as well.
The Chocolate Bible is a beautiful book, a sure hit for all the home-based pastry-chef wannabes hiding out there — and they know who they are! What is refreshing is that this book does not gush on and on about how wonderful/indescribable/mysterious/sinful/indulgent chocolate is, as so many recent American books do. It presents an incredibly versatile ingredient, shows what you can do with it, and lets the results speak for themselves.
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