Chocolate suppliers
If you're making a chocolate recipe, you cannot cook with Hersheys.
If you're using the sacks of chocolate chips or the baking bars from regular supermarkets, your best bet is the semi-sweet or bitter chocolate for their higher cocoa solids content.
But it's really worth going to the extra cost of buying good chocolate, such as Valrhona from Whole Foods and Dean & DeLuca. Or buy dark chocolate made by companies like Lindt that show a cocoa solid content on their labels of 50% and above.
An excellent, more local brand is Scharffen Berger from Berkeley, California specializing in high cocoa-solid content dark chocolates, made according to artisanal European methods and with vintage machinery. Available from Whole Foods, Dean & DeLuca, Balducci's, Sur La Table.
The Lebanese Taverna Market, 4400 Old Dominion Blvd, Arlington, 703 276 8681, is one of the best suppliers of a wide range of good European eating and cooking chocolate.
Kingsbury Chocolates, 1017 King Street, Alexandria, 703 548 2800, is a small-production artisan chocolatier with three generations of chocolate connoisseurs and recipes are behind his selections.
The Curious Grape, 4056 South 28th Street, Arlington, 703 671 8700 is an excellent wine store with an extraordinary range of single origin chocolates.
Fresh chocolates to eat are flown in regularly from Europe for sale at Dean & DeLuca and Balducci's. The Swiss Bakery and Pastry Shop, Ravensworth Shopping Center, 5224 Port Royal Road, Springfield, VA, 703 321 3670, and Burke Town Plaza, 9536 Old Keene Mill Rd, Burke, VA, 703 569 3670, stocks a vast range of European chocolates, from Camille Bloch, Ragusa, Torino, Felchlin and various Lindts plus Milka.
Here's an unexpected discovery: If you're traveling in India, the Good-Housekeeping Company in Mumbai makes a fantastic brand of eating chocolates, sold loose in a bronze box, called Fantaisie. There are 33 varieties in one box, apparently. I can't confirm, I was too busy eating them.
Corona is a chocolate brand from Columbia sold in bars and used for traditional hot chocolate drinks. It contains no sugar and lists as its ingredients 100% selected cocoa beans so it's probbly as close as you can get to what Montezuma offered Cortez; available from Latin American supermarkets, it's good in drinks but not, in my experience, for baking or desserts.
More European-style drinking chocolate powder, like Caotina in Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate, and White Chocolate flavor, is sold by The Swiss Bakery.