The s'more is one of the great American desserts, and it is usually made with the cheapest possible chocolate. Here is what the best chocolate for s'mores actually is, and how we build ours.
What is the best chocolate for s'mores? A chocolate with enough cocoa to stand up to a toasted marshmallow, and enough real cocoa butter to melt from the marshmallow's heat alone. In practice that means a good bittersweet around 65%, or a serious milk chocolate, in a piece thick enough to go soft without disappearing.
The thin milk bar we all grew up with fails on both counts. I say that with affection. It was never about the chocolate anyway. But once you make a s'more with chocolate that can hold its own, it is hard to go back.
Why does the marshmallow beat the chocolate?
A toasted marshmallow is hot, sweet, and loud. Put it on a thin commodity milk bar and the chocolate surrenders twice: the flavor vanishes under all that sugar, and the bar either stays stubbornly solid (those hardened fats again) or squirts out the sides. What you taste is marshmallow on a cracker.
A 65% bittersweet square does the opposite. The deeper cocoa pushes back against the sweetness, and real cocoa butter melts at close to body temperature, so the heat of the marshmallow alone is enough to take it exactly to soft. Balance, not surrender.
Do you need a campfire?
No, and this is the part people are happiest to learn. Five minutes under the broiler, or a gentle pass with a kitchen torch, is all it takes. The marshmallow toasts, the chocolate softens underneath, and nobody has to build a fire on a Tuesday.
How we build ours
Our S'mores Collection is your childhood revisited, just built from better parts. A fresh organic graham cracker, topped with a square of our house 65% bittersweet chocolate and our soft vanilla marshmallow, made here in San Francisco. Each one is four inches square and weighs in at a quarter pound, which is to say: one is dessert, not a snack. They come individually wrapped in boxes of four or eight.
And for the milk chocolate loyalists: you are not wrong, you just deserve better milk chocolate. We have been working on a milk chocolate s'more for later this summer, built on the same fresh graham and marshmallow. More on that soon.
National S'more Day lands on August 10, but I have never needed the excuse. Make one properly this week: good chocolate, real marshmallow, five minutes under the broiler. You will see why this dessert earned its place.
Enjoy,
Chuck Siegel
Founder, Charles Chocolates
Chuck Siegel
Founder, Charles Chocolates
Chuck has been making chocolate in San Francisco since 1987. Self-taught, he founded his first chocolate company, Attivo Confections, sold it in 1995, and started Charles Chocolates in 2004 on one uncommon idea: chocolate should be treated like fresh food.
Everything is made in small batches with all-natural ingredients (real cream, real butter, real fruit) and no shortcuts. His work has earned a Good Food Award, Sunset Magazine's Best of the West, and recognition from San Francisco Magazine, and has been covered by KQED and the San Francisco food press.
