Dark Chocolate Strawberries

Strawberries must be completely dry. Use high-quality chocolate - cheap chocolate won't temper properly. The coconut oil helps achieve a smooth, glossy finish.

Chocolate-covered strawberries look as though they must be ancient — two of the world's most luxurious flavours, united. In fact their specific combination is a 1960s American invention. Multiple food history sources, including Tasting Table and the Daily Meal, credit Lorraine Lorusso, a confectioner working at a small gourmet shop called Stop N' Shop in Chicago, with creating them in the 1960s by dipping fresh strawberries in the gourmet chocolate sold in her store and offering the hardened result to customers. The treat caught on quickly. In the late 1970s, David Lamme Teich introduced chocolate-covered strawberries at Lammes Candies in Austin, Texas — customers were initially sceptical, but within a short time they became so popular that they drove an annual Valentine's Day tradition that continues to this day. The ingredients themselves, however, carry far longer histories. Cacao was cultivated and revered by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec civilisations of Mesoamerica, where it was consumed as a bitter drink, used as currency, and offered in ritual. Spanish explorers brought cacao to Europe in the 16th century, and the solid chocolate bar emerged in 19th-century Britain. The modern large, sweet cultivated strawberry — Fragaria × ananassa — is itself a Franco-botanical creation: French botanist Amédée-François Frézier brought Chilean strawberry plants to France in 1714, and the crossbreeding of those with North American wild strawberries in France during the 1750s produced the strawberry we know today. Two very old ingredients; one surprisingly young pairing.