How To Taste Chocolate

Enjoying chocolate should involve exploration, learning, and all of your senses. With that in mind, here's our guide to help you to learn, explore, and taste chocolate like we do in the TCHO lab while teaching your palate a new trick or two.

Smell is 90% of taste. To smell your chocolate, you should start out by giving it a little massage. By warming up the chocolate, you release some of the scent that’s been locked in, and you also get your taste buds ready to receive the chocolatey goodness. Different smells can indicate different parts of the world, and even specific bean breeds. What do you smell? Let your brain make associations, even if they aren't logical. Does your chocolate smell like Muir Woods? Your grandma's cranberry sauce? A lavender bush? Go with it.

Look at the consistency of the chocolate's color. Is it even? Is the chocolate shiny? The shinier a chocolate, the better it's been tempered (tempering is the process that lines up the chocolate molecules into a crystal lattice). Is there any white, powdery-looking stuff on the top of your chocolate? This is called bloom, and happens when chocolate isn't tempered correctly.

Listening to your chocolate is more important than you might think. And the sound your chocolate makes is also related to the molecules in it. When they're all lined up (and shiny), it's harder to break them apart. So when you break good chocolate apart, it should make a clean, bright, snapping sound.

Texture is a big deal, so how does the melting chocolate feel in your mouth? Waxy? Smooth? Gritty? Smooth usually means good, but there really is no right or wrong here; if you enjoy something, don't listen to anyone who tells you it isn't "good."

On to the big question. How does your chocolate taste? If chocolate is overly sweet or vanilla-flavored, it more or less defeats the whole point of eating chocolate, which, ultimately, is to taste chocolate. So what does the chocolate taste like? Is it bright? Bitter? It might help to work your way from generalities to specifics. What other foods does the chocolate remind you of? How does the flavor change as the chocolate melts and dissipates? Do the flavors interact in different ways over time?

The taste of chocolate matures over a tasting session, and after the chocolate is gone there are still opportunities for taste. The length of a chocolate aftertaste, or "tail" as it's called, is an indication of quality, as long as you enjoy the tail, of course. Is the aftertaste different from the way the chocolate tasted when it was present? Is it woodier now? Drier? Did the chocolate improve or deteriorate with mouth-time

Remember: every mouth is different, and there are no right or wrong answers in tasting. Discover your chocolate!

How To Taste Chocolate

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