Choc & awe
Nigella shares the secrets to her favourite chocolate dishes with Dan Stock
She might be the globally adored author of a dozen cookbooks that take pride of place in countless kitchens around the world and who is beamed into our loungerooms whipping up simple, deceptively decadent meals. But when it comes to dessert Nigella Lawson is just like any sweet tooth for whom a meal is not complete unless it comes with something created from the Theobroma cacao tree.
“I love chocolate,” she says. “But I don’t like chocolate that’s sugary and fatty. I like it when it tastes like chocolate. A dark, salty chocolate, 70 per cent, that’s my normal.”
Chocolate, she says, has a profound power and pull over people that few other foodstuffs have.
“People go crazy for it, they really do. I suspect there must be something elemental about it. I’ve read various explanations from scientists that say when you eat chocolate it releases something that gives you the same feeling as being in love.” And there’s much to love about Nigella’s gooey emergency chocolate brownies, her sticky chocolate pudding and her cool chocolate cheesecake, just some of the hundreds of choc-tastic creations she has devised over her two-decade cooking career.
Her rule of thumb when it comes to cooking with chocolate is simple: “It’s so wonderful to eat a bar of chocolate, you mustn’t use it in cooking unless you’re going to make something that can hold its head up beside a bar of chocolate.”
It’s a rule she applies to great effect in her latest book,
At My Table, which features a half dozen new riffs on chocolate, including a chocolate olive oil mousse, double choc and pumpkin seed cookies, and a showstopping chocolate cake with coffee buttercream.
It’s also a rule she’ll judge when she returns to the
MasterChef kitchen for “Nigella Week”, where one pressure test will see this year’s batch of contestants cook four of her favourite chocolate dishes in just 75 minutes.
But what are her commandments when it comes to cocoa? How does she create dishes that can stand proud beside a good bar of chocolate?
Bean scene
Nigella says just like single origin coffee has transformed what’s offered in cafes so, too, has single origin cocoa transformed the home kitchen.
“It’s certainly important in cooking, because if you don’t use the right chocolate when you cook it’s going to change the end result,” she says. “If you’re making a chocolate mousse, for instance, whatever chocolate you use is going to come through very forcefully, and so you want it to have a chocolatey taste, not just a sweet taste.”
Baked expectations
“I make chocolate cookies a lot. I think I’m done with them, but then I get an idea and want to make another batch. There’s something about the smell when you’re baking with chocolate. When it’s in the oven, it’s one of those really warm, uplifting smells.”
Scents and sensibility
And as anyone who’s walked into a house that has a tray of biscuits in the oven knows, that smell of chocolate in the air proves almost irresistible.
“That smell of food, the scent of it, is so important. For me that’s such a part of food. Food is there to be enjoyed. In every single part of it, the smell, the feel of it. You snap a bar of chocolate and that’s so pleasurable. Or when you’re making some cookies and you clatter out the chocolate chips into a bowl. I love all that,” Nigella says.
“For me, food is to be relished in every point of the journey. I don’t want to miss any of it.”
Cool combinations
It’s not just the physical senses that cooking engages that proves so exciting for Nigella, but the creative process of combining flavours and ingredients in sometimes unexpected ways.
“I wanted a snap to go with the chocolate, but something more subtle than having nuts,” she says of adding pumpkin seeds to a chocolate cookie. “I just tried adding them and I really love them. A friend with young children came around and I thought (the cookies) would be too dark for them but they adored them.”
Savour the sweet
“I sometimes use chocolate as a spice,” Nigella says. That might mean adding a touch of dark chocolate to gingerbread to give it a bitter note, or even adding some dark chocolate chips to a bowl of chilli. “It seems to add a depth, but not sweetness, to the dish.”
White night
While white chocolate doesn’t often feature in Nigella’s cooking (“White chocolate isn’t really chocolate, it’s vanilla and fat, really, in a good way”) but when it does, it often comes in creative combinations.
“I’ve found adding cardamom to white chocolate is a wonderful way to counter what can be really intense sweetness,” she says. “It brings balance, and gives it a somewhat exotic intensity, rather than an infantile, comforting taste. It really changes it.”
It’s a similar balance using a crumb made from gingernut biscuits for the base of a white chocolate cheesecake brings.
“There’s the tang of cream cheese and lemon juice with the warmth of ginger. You give this to someone who hates white chocolate and say you’ll like this, and they usually do.”
Oils ain’t oils
It’s not, admittedly, the first thing that springs to mind when thinking of its perfect partner, but olive oil and chocolate are not the strange bedfellows they might at first blush seem.
“The Spanish use olive oil when they make chocolate mousse quite a lot. I was interested in that, I ate one and thought it was so fantastic. It gives it a very different texture. It’s not a conventional mousse that’s enormously aerated and set; it has to be just set but with a rather smooth finish, when you lift the spoon out it has a slight ripple.”
Her version, Nigella says, is bold and robust, using more extra virgin olive oil than many other recipes.
“But you can do as you wish with the oil. You could go grassy, some are fruitier, you can choose the olive oil that you
CHOCOLATE LIQUEUR SELF- SAUCING PUDDINGS taste. com. au
like,” she says. “It’s quite intense, but I really like it. That slight savoury note, for me, is something I really enjoy with sweet food. I love that balance of salt and sweet.”
Cocoa cake
Necessity is the mother of invention, so the saying goes, and this is doubly true foror the home cook.
“I’ve got a friend withh Crohn’s disease, another who’s a coeliac. One didn’t do dairy, the other didn’t do gluten. I wantedd to keep everyone happy, so o made a chocolate and olive oil cake with almond meal,” she says.
It was a success, withh the bitterness of the cocoa coming together with the sweetnessness of the almonds, the oil bindingding the lot together. “I wanted a cake that would be not so much an afternoon tea type of cake, but perhaps after dinner you’d have it with some raspberries.”
Easy pleasey
“There used to be a real fashion for a chocolate tart. You’d make the pastry then make the chocolate filling, bake all that. It’s quite hard work,” Nigella says. “I think, what is this giving me that a chocolate bar isn’t giving me, or a chocolate cake isn’t giving me? It isn’t giving me that much, it’s just giving me a lot more work.”
The solution to this — and so many other kitchen conundrums — forms the basis for Nigella’s recipes: to make life simple in the kitchen.
“I want to make people’s cooking life easier,” she says.
Her take on the chocolate tart, then, involves crushing chocolate biscuits to make a base, rather than making and baking a pastry case.
“I much preferred it, it was a better contrast and it was much easier,” she says. “This is giving me more than a choc cake and it’s very low effort.”
Angels and demons
A keen advocate of cooking and eating real food, Nigella says the sporadic demonisation of various foods is simply a source of anxiety for many people around eatingeating. “I know I’m the type of person that is not temperamentally temperament suited to any form of exc lu exclusionary eating. “If I say tto myself, I can’t eat that — tthat’s all I’d want to eat. I ththink it is more about abou how much you eat aand whether you eat when you’re hungry hu or not.” Which, of course, applies ap to chocolate.
“The Spanish use olive oil when they make chocolate mousse. I was interested in that.” THINKING OUTSIDE THE S WEET B OX