Melting chocolate for cooking. By Lee Davison.

So you want to use chocolate in your cooking. Well mixing in a bar of Cadbury's Bournville is going to be quite hard work unless you melt it first.

Duh!

Get a smallish saucepan and put about 1 to 2 inches of water in it. Not quite enough to reach the bottom of the bowl. Put it on a low to medium heat (about two and a half on a 1 to 6 scale.)
Put a heatproof bowl1 in the top of the saucepan and in that place the chocolate broken up into chunks. Now keep one eye on it while you get on with something else.
Not a lot seems to be happening but it is. As the bowl warms up the chocolate will begin to melt. You can see it's getting lighter in colour as the melt progresses.
Getting there. The lighter colouring has progressed almost to the centre and the chocolate is about three quaters melted here.
Even though it's almost completely melted the chocolate holds it's shape. The only real visible change is that the colour has lightened throughout and it now has a 'glossy' look.
A quick stir to make sure there are no lumps and you're ready to use.

[1] Pyrex bowl, breakfast bowl - close enough.

Last page update: 9th July, 2003.

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