Cook school confidential: cooking with chocolate

'Step up and spend more money. You cannot make crap chocolate taste or look good; it just won’t happen. You have to spend enough to make sure your chocolate doesn’t contain vegetable fats or anything else that doesn’t belong there. And don’t be attracted to shiny packaging – all those bars on the supermarket shelf that are wrapped in foil and have all the right words on there to suck you in probably aren’t that great. Just look at the ingredients – there should be cocoa beans, sugar, natural vanilla and sometimes soya or sunflower lecithin, nothing else.'

'Open your storecupboard. Everyone has something at home they can add to chocolate whether it’s spices, herbs, condiments, salt or pepper. Look in your alcohol cupboard, too; you don’t have to stick to the liqueurs. You can make a water ganache out of whisky, sherry or red wine – just changing that one ingredient will completely transform your recipe.'

'Don’t spend your money on lots of equipment when you’re starting out. All you need to master the basics is a wooden spoon and a mixing bowl. Once you can temper chocolate, you can mould, sculpt, curl and shard, and all you need is a bowl or a small granite slab which you can get from Argos for less than £10. When you’ve mastered tempering, you can move on to other things.'

'Buy some books or go on a course to see just how simple it can be to cook with chocolate. It’s been intimidating for so many years but people are starting to realise it can be easy. It’s a bit like macarons – for years it was a secret until they did it on Bake Off and now everyone’s making them. It can be frustrating to get things right in the beginning and you won’t get it overnight, but you’ll nail the techniques soon enough.'

'Touch and feel chocolate when you’re working with it. Analyse the temperature and the taste – if it’s grainy then it’s probably not right, if it’s oily then it’s probably split and if it tastes burnt then it probably is. Chocolate is one of the only foods that melts at body temperature, so as humans we’re very in tune with it. The cocoa bean is so different from what we call chocolate, but you don’t want to change it too much. Keep it true to its flavour and when you’ve got the basic skills sorted just keep playing around with it.'