How to rescue food, lesson 93B

[nosrednayduj]

I went to BJ's, the local wholesale store (think Costco; only less national). One of the things I often buy there is giant bags of dark chocolate chips, with intent to just eat them by the handful. (Secretly this is less healthy for me than M&Ms because it has higher fat content, and I have a cholesterol problem, not a blood sugar problem.) Anyway, I picked up the bag by the end when I put it in my cart, when I put it on the conveyor belt, and when I put it in the car. Then, when I got home, I picked it up by the middle of the bag. That's when I discovered it was fairly solid. Chocolate chips should feel like they have individual small things inside the bag. Whoops. Apparently this had a bad day with heat sometime in its travels to the store.

Well, I didn't really feel like going back to the store, and chocolate is chocolate, right? So, first I just kind of banged the bag on the counter to break it into smaller chunks, and then out comes the rolling pin and a Ziploc bag, where I dumped the chunks in and attempted to hammer them. A bunch of chip-sized objects fell off of the larger chunks, and I scooped them into a separate bowl, but eventually it got to the point where I was just banging on large chunks of chocolate and having them get mashed rather than breaking up. So, out comes the chisel, which I washed carefully, and I chiseled the large chunks into smaller ones.

Most of the chunks are still too big for making any kind of cookies, but they are at least smaller than king-sized candy bars, and since mostly we just eat these by the handful, we will just eat them by the chunk instead!

Comments

[lauradi7dw]

I try to buy fair trade chocolate, always in the past either bars or cocoa powder. I have started making CC cookies during the at home time, at Arthur's request. It bothered me that I was buying regular chocolate chips, so after some thought, we ordered a small case (12 bags) directly from Equal Exchange. We were startled upon receipt to find that they were shipped in a styrofoam-lined box, presumably to prevent exactly that kind of problem. Sigh. We have declared it a back-up cooler, but don't think we'll ever need that.

[nosrednayduj]

The church social justice committee has a fair trade chocolate sale, but it's just bars. We also buy some of those, but I'm not really dedicated to the cause. Probably I should be given the amount of chocolate I consume.

[zipperbear]

I reformatted a virus-laden PC for a co-worker's wife, and suggested that Ghirardelli dark chocolate would be a fine thank-you gift, thinking of the bags of snack-size portions. Soon there was a 10-pound slab of chocolate waiting for me at my desk. Sawing is messy, a chisel is less so. Melting and tempering is also tricky, but silicone muffin pans are handy, and I'm still using it up. At the start of quarantine, when regular flour was sold out, I made Martha Stewart's recipe for spelt brownies (good, but I didn't notice a spelt taste).
https://www.marthastewart.com/1047290/dark-chocolate-spelt-brownies

[nosrednayduj]

Many (and I mean many) years ago, Pavel gave me a holiday gift of a 10 pound bar of chocolate. We didn't own a chisel at the time, so we had to press a screwdriver and a small hammer into service. I am a chocoholic, and so it only lasted a few months.

[apparentparadox]

I've found a serrated knife works to get manageable hunks off a big slab, and then a regular knife kind of works after that. I actually bought one of those pronged thingies that they recommend for breaking up chocolate but found that more work than it was worth.

[apparentparadox]

The spelt brownies look interesting. I've been trying lots of brownie recipes to find my favorite(s).