Saturday, March 5, 2011

WTF, Whole Foods?

Ingredient quality is something I've never quite figured out about baking.  Back in the day, we were a strictly Hershey's Cocoa/Toll House chips family.  Then again, back in the day, I'm pretty sure there weren't all these crazy baking options, Martha Stewart wasn't a thing yet, etc.
Right when I graduated college I went through a generics phase.  My sister practically had a heart attack when she saw my kitchen and its Kroger brand cocoa.  Whatever, I was cheap, it still tasted good.
I converted to Ghiradelli for my chocolate chip needs about a year ago.  I used to love eating regular old semisweet chocolate chips out of the bag, and now they just don't taste that good to me anymore.  For generic chocolate chip cookies, my go to is the Ghiradelli bittersweet chocolate chip.  SO much better.
Sometimes, though, a girl wants to branch out.  I've been wanting to make those Levain bakery style cookies for awhile, and I felt these required a more quality chip.  The regular grocery store doesn't have anything, so I ventured to Whole Foods.  I knew this would be expensive, but holy crap.
The recipe I'd been looking at recommended Scharffen Berger chunks, so of course they didn't have these.  After spending five minutes panicking over horrifying prices, I remembered that you only live once, and thus decided to suck it up.  I purchased the following:
  • Guittard Bittersweet Chocolate disks
  • Dagoba choolate drops
  • a Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate bar
In total this cost me something absurd like $20.  All, of course, were excellent.  I think my favorite was the Guittard.  It's a pretty big disk if you're doing chocolate chip cookies, but I'm personally a fan of that, and the taste was fantastic.

Overall this was absurd and I need to find somewhere to start buying nice chocolate in bulk.  Costco only ever has Toll House which I did buy last weekend, but I can only use that for 'less nice' stuff.  I'm starting to understand how bakeries charge absurd amounts for a brownie.

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