Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

My kids and I made this today. It turned out great! To be honest, I used the microwave to melt the chocolate, and it still turned out snappy and delicious. We had fun doing this together! I'm grateful for the easy recipe.

I get it — romantic Valentine’s Day themed desert. But who wouldn’t just wait until strawberries are fresh in the spring, straight from the farmers market, and relish their sweetness and juice as is? You can dip anything in chocolate for a serviceable dessert. Including, I guess, oversized and mass produced supermarket strawberries in February. Me, I’ll wait for the real thing and skip the dip.

To anyone out there who is intimidated by the more precise instructions - as long as the chocolate melts onto the strawberries and you set them in the fridge, it's pretty hard to mess up chocolate covered strawberries. After all, chocolate generally remains solid at room temperature. The perks of proper tempering (which I'm excited to try) strike me as a nice-to-have. You can enjoy great chocolate covered strawberries even if it doesn't work out.

Wonderful, made per the recipe. It was fun and pretty easy. It was a perfect Valentine treat!

Contrary to the histrionics in the comments section, I (like many others who actually tried the recipe) ran into no issues tempering without a thermometer. These were delicious and very easy to make.

Anybody actually try following this recipe yet? How’d it go?

Recipe worked well, thank you!

Start with your largest strawberries, and save the smaller ones for the end when your chocolate level is lower. You'll thank yourself!

This was my first time tempering chocolate and it worked perfectly! I didn’t use a thermometer, just a lot of stirring and patience. The chocolate set into a glossy, snappy shell almost immediately at room temperature. Tempering chocolate has always intimidated me but this recipe made it easy! I wish I could attach a picture, they look so beautiful.

Didn’t care for the dark chocolate. Next time will use semisweet. A little bitter. The white chocolate was fine.

This is absolutely delicious. This year I couldn't find any chocolate-covered srawberries in our nearly Kroger and I decided to do it myself. It turned out to be fabulous and I would do this again every year. It was hard to to get the right amount of chocolate, but I used whatever is left to dip the animal crackers. It was great too!

Instead of olive oil, I typically use coconut oil. That helps preserve the "snap" of the chocolate.

Eric Kim calls this "faux tempering." That is misleading, because it's not tempering AT ALL! Unless they are kept refrigerated, strawberries dipped in chocolate "tempered" this way will be sticky and messy at room temperature. There are any number of great videos online that will teach you how to actually temper chocolate. An inexpensive thermometer, accurate in the 85 to 115 degree range, and a rubber spatula is all you'll need. It's easy, and takes virtually no practice.

Having watched and helped my aunt temper chocolate 50 years ago, I would be VERY hesitant to attempt the process without using a properly calibrated candy thermometer (or these days, a good quality digital thermometer). Even a couple of degrees off can result in white streaks on the hardened chocolate. Checking the temperature by comparing the warmth of the melted chocolate to the temperature of one's lower lip is also too subjective. Not everyone perceives warmth or cold the same.