Cook this: Soft cheese salad with blackberries, mint and nibs from Cocoa — National Post

Our cookbook of the week is Cocoa by award-winning food writer Sue Quinn. Tomorrow, we’ll feature an interview with its author.

To try another recipe from the book, check out: Malted chocolate fudge sauce, and salted honey, pear and chocolate tarte tatin.

Intensely chocolatey with a satisfying crunch, cacao nibs deserve more culinary attention. In Cocoa, Sue Quinn highlights their versatility in both sweet and savoury recipes, ranging from a rose petal and cacao nib jam to this soft cheese salad with blackberries, mint and nibs.

“It’s a really sophisticated salad but a really simple way of incorporating a bit of cocoa nibs, bitterness and flavour complexity,” says Quinn, adding that it’s important to source good nibs. “It’s a little bit like chocolate – the quality varies.”

Nibs are pieces of crushed cacao beans that have been fermented, dried and roasted. Since they haven’t been ground and mixed with sugar, they’re predominantly bitter and bear unadulterated cocoa flavour; not sweetness. Depending on the type, they can carry fruity, floral, nutty, toasted or spicy flavours.

“Chocolate in its natural state can have lots of berry notes in it. For example, Madagascar is famous for producing cacao beans that have a lot of these really fruity, rich notes,” says Quinn. “By combining cacao nibs in a salad like this, you enhance those fruity notes because some of those flavours are in the cacao nibs.”

via Cook this: Soft cheese salad with blackberries, mint and nibs from Cocoa — National Post