Melting the Chocolate for the Strawberries

Rob Kingsbury: Hi, I am Rob Kingsbury with the ACKC Cocoa Bar and today I am showing you how to dip strawberries in chocolate. With this clip I am going to be talking about the different types of chocolate that we will be using. So today I have a beautiful white chocolate, a milk chocolate and some nice sweet dark chocolate. The chocolate itself is from Belgium, you can get great quality chocolate like this from your high-end grocery stores as well as your specialty food stores. The benefit of using really great chocolate is that it pairs well with the fresh ingredient. So the benefit of pairing really good chocolate with really good strawberries is that you are getting really great two ingredients paired well together. So your end result is something that you are going to really enjoy and is going to leave a beautiful lasting impression on your taste buds. So to find really good chocolate make sure you take the extra mile. I know it's really easy to find a lot of chips of chocolate out there, they have the vegetable oil in them but that leaves a coating in your mouth. So using beautiful high-end chocolate and Couverture is the way to go. So first off what we are going to do is just warm this up in the microwave. When you are working with the chocolate, you don't want to burn it. So you have to always cook your chocolate at 50% power and the important step is to always do it in intervals that are less than a minute. So I usually suggest about 45 seconds. So when you put this in the microwave, do it at 50% power for 45 seconds, you are going to pull it back out and you are going to give it a stir. Then you are going to put it back in the microwave again for 45 seconds, going to take it back out and give it another stir. At this point you are going to see the chocolate really starting to melt and become really smooth. So now we have a chocolate melted. So for each of this chocolates it only took three 45 second intervals. Make sure every time you pull it out after 45 second to give it good stir. you put it back in there and always make sure you put it on 50% power. So just as an aside the reason I like using the microwave with the chocolate and stir it with the double boiler method that a lot of people are more familiar with is that chocolate and water don't mix. The same reason that we want to make sure that the strawberries were patted dry after you rinse them off, is that just a little drop of water put into one of these bowls of chocolate will seize it up. It will be completely hard, can't dip with it, you have to put it aside, you start over from scratch. So the microwave is pretty much a full proof method that you are not going to get any humidity when you are using like a double boiler into your chocolate. You are going to have a really nice product to work with and the other thing with this is chocolate itself because it has such a nice content of cocoa butter in it is going to stay very fluid for a long time. So you have plenty of time to work with the strawberries and the chocolate while you are getting this dipped and decorated. Decorated is our next clip. So I will see you soon.