The One Brand Of Chocolate Ina Garten Always Bakes With

Whether you're making a fresh batch of chocolate chunk cookies or a luxuriously light chocolate mousse fit to fill a pie, plenty of desserts call for stopping by your supermarket's chocolate aisle. But with so many different bars lined up and on display, it can be a struggle to choose the best one for baked goods. Even once you figure out what type of chocolate you're looking for, you'll need to decide which brand to buy. While you could decide based on the price or the prettiest labeling, it's a much better bet to follow in food world icon Ina Garten's footsteps.

Anyone familiar with her television series or cookbooks knows that the Barefoot Contessa takes her ingredients seriously. After all, her culinary career got its start through her gourmet food store, where she spent nearly two decades preparing and selling specialty foods before becoming a star on the screen. So, when it comes to chocolate, rest assured that she has a favorite brand for baking the most delicious desserts. In interviews and recipes, Ina Garten almost always recommends Lindt.

When speaking with Sam Sifton, the founding editor of New York Times Cooking, in 2020 at a virtual talk that celebrated the launch of her cookbook "Modern Comfort Food," she discussed her love for Lindt chocolate (via Business Insider). Garten told Sifton that even after her team did a blind taste test with eight different brands, she still selected Lindt as her favorite. Clearly, it must be good.

Lindt chocolate holds a special place in Ina Garten's heart for a few reasons, starting with flavor. While some people are particular about their preferred cacao percentage, the optimal chocolate should have a strong earthy, nutty cocoa flavor but still taste plenty sweet. For the Barefoot Contessa, Lindt checks this box. When she got together with former Bon Appétit food director Carla Lalli Music to bake chocolate-pecan scones, she touched on the blind taste test again and said, "[Lindt] was just the right balance of sweet and bitter" (via YouTube).

Even with the choice of chocolate bars on store shelves, according to Garten, Lindt simply does it better. In addition to the fact that the Swiss chocolatier company has been around since 1845 and founder Rodolphe Lindt invented a chocolate-making technique that forever changed the industry, the brand is committed to high-quality, premium ingredients. While some competitors' bittersweet bars might feature additives and fillers, which can diminish the rich taste of chocolate, Lindt keeps its ingredients lists short and sweet — and then spends a lot of time and care choosing and preparing them, just like Garten.

Considering its premium quality, Lindt chocolate is also fairly affordable and comes in big bars — another selling point for Garten. As she told Sam Sifton during her talk, when choosing ingredients, you don't need to buy the most expensive ones. The Contessa's evergreen cooking advice? "Buy the best ingredient you can buy," she said.

When it comes to Ina Garten's most popular desserts (a list that wouldn't be complete without her famous Beatty's chocolate cake), there's a particular type of Lindt chocolate she tends to use. It's the same one she specifically name-drops on the ingredients list of many of her recipes, from her chocolate-pecan scones to her chocolate mousse.

To bake like the Barefoot Contessa, you'll want to buy Lindt Swiss bittersweet chocolate (potentially even in bulk), which she recommended in an Instagram Live interview with Katie Couric in 2020 (via YouTube). According to Lindt's website, the gourmet chocolate bar is created with its original Swiss chocolate recipe, consisting of only sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, soy lecithin for emulsification, and vanilla. Each slab is also split into squares, making it convenient to portion for baking.

Of course, when baking with chocolate, certain recipes call for semisweet chocolate instead. While the two types are sometimes used interchangeably, it tends to be sweeter by compromising somewhat on flavor depth. Compared to bittersweet, which contains 70% cacao and less sugar, semisweet chocolate has 60% cacao. For muffins, brownies, or chocolate chip cookies, mouth-watering morsels of semisweet chocolate offer a burst of sweetness, while bittersweet's bolder flavor is a must for rich chocolate cakes and pies and dark chocolate desserts. Still, beyond the essential unsweetened baker's chocolate and cocoa powder, Garten is most fond of bittersweet for its aptly named balanced combination of flavors.