Tuesday, May 08, 2001


a young woman's thoughts turn to chocolate on these cooler spring days!

not only will i start some bread tomorrow, i'm thinking about buying some chocolate. ordinarily, i would have schlepped into mall-hattan and dropped a kidney to buy chocolate at dean & deluca. don't protest -- i'm well aware of the existence of the kitchen market, which is almost as expensive and even snobbier. (their chocolate selections aren't listed on their website.) but lately the charming coffee store down the street (at atlantic and clinton), two for the pot, has taken to carrying scharffenberger and callebaut chips. so convenient.

i also have delighted in the dusty back shelves of the famous economy candy, on the lower east side, where you can get name brand chocolate -- valrhona, cluziel, cote d'or, lindt, callebaut, scharffenberger and many others -- at discount prices. the only problem is storage. i'm not always happy with the condition of the chocolate at economy. even allowing for just average photography, you can see from their website that bloom and condition can be less than optimum, as in the pictures of the chocolate wafers.

i'm well aware that not everyone across the country has the option of hopping on the subway and choosing from 4 stores for chocolate. i've heard a lot of good things about the boutique chocosphere in portland, oregon. i haven't bought there myself, but the prices are somewhat less than dean & deluca, although the shipping costs can be serious.

still, if you want to feature a high quality chocolate in your torrone or tart and live far from a fancy store, chocosphere's bulk options could be helpful to you. by bulk i don't mean discount, but rather in chef and caterer's sizes -- 1 and 2 kilo lots! they also carry some chocolates, like nirvana, that are very hard to find. not even dean & deluca carries them regularly. so check them out. and if you have a really super recipe for fudgy, dense chocolate brownies, send it my way, will you?

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