Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Pretzels

“Bark” chocolate coating

whole strawberries (or anything you want to dip in chocolate, really)

Wash the strawberries and dry every last drop of water off them or the chocolate will solidify and never melt again. Make sure any utensils you use to stir the chocolate are also dry. Melt the chocolate in a saucepan (or double boiler) on low and dip the strawberries one by one, holding by their leaves. It looks nice to leave a little red showing at the top. Place in paper candy cups to dry (or on waxed paper). Work fast, because once the chocolate’s been on the heat for a while it’ll start to chunk up.

--dictated by Kelly R. (she refused to write it down)

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast Patreon bonus episode for May 2019. I’m Kate Shaw and we’re going to learn how to make chocolate-covered strawberries and pretzels.

I learned how to make these from my friend Kelly back when we both worked at a big used book store. I got the idea that we should put together a cookbook with recipes from both staff members and regular customers. That idea never went anywhere but I did gather some recipes. I’ve since lost them all except for Kelly’s recipe.

Every Valentine’s Day, I see prices for chocolate-dipped strawberries that are just ridiculous. Don’t people know how easy it is to make them at home? The only hard part is finding decent strawberries in February. It’s too late for this year, unfortunately, but they’d make a great Mother’s Day treat.

Before you do anything else, prepare your strawberries by rinsing them and drying them carefully with paper towels. Your goal is to get as much moisture off the berries as you can, with the acknowledgement that they won’t stay dry for long, so do this soon before you plan to dip the berries. Discard any strawberries that look overripe or underripe. Also get out anything else you plan to dip and make sure you can get into the package easily with one hand. I used mini pretzels, but anything that would taste good with chocolate on it is fair game. If it’s a fruit or vegetable, rinse and dry it.

Next, place a piece of waxed paper on the counter where you can reach it easily from the stove. You can also use a clean paper bag which you’ve unfolded and opened flat, but I never seem to have paper bags these days and I do have waxed paper. Kelly recommended using paper candy cups, and I suppose you could use regular baking cups.

Next, get your chocolate out. The recipe calls for Bark coating, which is a brand you can find in the baking aisle of most supermarkets. It’s not the highest quality chocolate, but it does taste good and it has the added benefit of drying quickly to a hard surface. That’s important, and I learned it the hard way today. I didn’t have any Bark coating but I did have a bag of Hershey Special Dark chocolate chips. I melted those and they worked great, but the better part of a day later and the pretzels are still sticky. Presumably the strawberries would still be sticky too, but I already ate them.

There are several ways you can melt chocolate. You can use a double boiler if you have one, or improvise a double boiler. If you have one, you know how to use it, so I won’t go into details about double boilers here. You can also microwave the chocolate in short bursts. Start with 30 seconds, stir the chocolate pieces, microwave for another 30 seconds, stir again, and follow up with 10-second intervals followed by stirring.

I tried the microwave method today with some white chocolate I had in the cupboard. I thought it would look nice drizzled over the dark chocolate pretzels and strawberries. But…it didn’t work. The most I got from the white chocolate was a sort of thick paste that smelled gross. Then I noticed the sell-by date on the box. The white chocolate expired in December 2014, so I