The Boozy Method Julia Child Used To Melt Chocolate

Intrepid home cooks have Julia Child to thank for a lot (no surprise there). The French chef contained multitudes both sweet and savory. For dinner, she liked simplified bouillabaisse, but added a whopping 30 cloves into her garlic mashed potatoes (yes, really). On the dessert side, she taught home cooks how to make foolproof cake batters and personally loved chocolatey French gâteau reine de saba. It's within the confectionery realm that Child shared a tip for another notoriously tough task: melting chocolate.

If you've ever scalded, burnt, or exploded a bowl of melted chocolate, you aren't alone. That silky texture can be more elusive to achieve than it seems. For hassle-free, satiny melted chocolate, Child melted her chips in dark rum and used a double boiler.

Aged rum and dark chocolate make a naturally complementary pairing. For starters, they boast comparable levels of sweetness — a basic principle for pairing food and alcohol. Dark chocolate and aged rum can also feature similar aromas (roasted, caramelized sugars) and the contrasting tastes of bitterness and sweetness, which creates a complex and nuanced profile. Their presence elevates each other, and the higher cacao percentages of dark and semisweet chocolates mean they can stand up to the punchiness of the alcohol in the rum.

Julia Child's technique begins by pouring 6 ounces of semi-sweet baking chocolate and ¼ cup of dark rum into a small saucepan. "I prefer to use either the Dutch or the German chocolates," she explains in a demonstration (via Facebook). "I think it has a richer taste." From there, she grabs a separate pan with high edges (a wide glass mixing bowl would also work here) and pours in a few inches of simmering water from a hot kettle. Then, she places the pot containing the rum and chocolate into the hot water, double-boiler style, pops a lid on top, and sets it aside.

Inside the lidded pot, the chocolate gently melts on its own thanks to the forming steam. Also, by using hot water as the heating element instead of the stovetop, Child's method ensures that the heat never becomes too high and the chocolate doesn't scorch when the cook walks away. For more uniform melting, use chocolate chips or chop the chocolate into small pieces before adding them to the pan.

The resulting combination creates a rich, sophisticated topping for any dessert. You could drape tangy cheesecake, peanut butter balls, marzipan bars, or vanilla bean ice cream in a layer of lush boozy chocolate. Plus, after you've finished melting your chocolate, you can stash that bottle of dark rum in your home bar cart to whip up a Painkiller or a Dark and Stormy cocktail later on.