The Prep Mistake That's Ruining Your Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

There's hardly a better match than strawberries and chocolate. Even better, whipping up a batch of chocolate-covered strawberries is fairly easy, if a bit labor- and gear-intensive. That doesn't mean there isn't room to improve your recipe or enough space to ruin a batch on bad technique.

One of the easiest steps to be a bit unfocused on is the strawberry prep work. After all, it's mostly just washing them. The mistake comes from not fully drying them once they're washed, with any water left on them making it harder for the chocolate to stick.

You can get around this by letting them air dry on the counter for about an hour, which also helps avoid another mistake: attempting to cover still-chilled strawberries in chocolate. When you combine the two, wet and cold, you get chocolate that doesn't set right for several reasons. This leaves you with a regular strawberry and flakes of chocolate that melt on your fingers if you try to eat them. That's hardly romantic.

The point of washing and using room-temp strawberries is to ensure your chocolate holds tight to the berries and maintains a smooth, luxurious sheen and texture. Failing to properly dry the strawberries does two things. You already know it makes it harder for the chocolate to stick since the water helps it slide off, but more importantly, even a few drops of water on your strawberries can make your chocolate seize. When chocolate seizes, it clumps up and becomes dry and gritty. It shouldn't be as clumpy as if you had overcooked the chocolate, but even a small bit of grit can ruin a good chocolate strawberry.

Failing to use room-temperature strawberries affects how the chocolate sets, with the colder the berry, the faster it sets. However, if the chocolate sets too quickly, it cracks. It's also why you shouldn't stick your berries in the freezer to speed things along. At best these cracks ruin your careful presentation, which is especially frustrating if you're planning on adding a swirl of a different kind of chocolate on top of your base layer. What's more likely, though, is the chocolate will just flake off when you try and enjoy it.

There are several ways to keep improving your chocolate-covered strawberry game, and it all starts with the berry. There are over 600 kinds of strawberries, so instead of hunting down a particular variety, it's better to look for general markers of quality. The two most important factors to consider are the strawberry's color and size. There should be no white around the stem, since that's a sign it was harvested too soon, and the smaller the berry the better the flavor (despite strawberries continually being bred to larger sizes to make them easier to harvest).

For the chocolate, make sure you're using semi-sweet or bittersweet baking chocolate. The strawberries should be plenty sweet enough to counteract the limited sweetness, and baking chocolate melts much easier than, say, your average chocolate chips. You can also take some inspiration from Magic Shell and add a dash of coconut oil to your chocolate. The oil helps the chocolate not just set better on the strawberries, it also adds a bit of shine to make the finished product more appetizing.