How to Taste Chocolate Like a Professional

Tasting chocolate means letting a piece melt on the tongue and paying attention while it does. It takes about a minute and needs no equipment. Most chocolate never gets that minute; it is chewed twice and swallowed, and the flavour never has time to appear, which is why so many chocolate bars seem to taste similar. This post details how to taste a chocolate bar for a savoury experience and finding the chocolate flavours you would love best.

Key takeaways

• Let each piece melt on the tongue for half a minute before swallowing.

• Fermentation and roasting decide the flavour long before a bar is moulded.

• Cocoa percentage measures sweetness; quality is decided earlier, at the ferment and the roast.

• A clean snap and an even shine indicate chocolate that was tempered properly.

• Taste at room temperature, upward through a flight, with nothing sweet beforehand.

How do chocolates get their flavour?

A cocoa bean lifted straight from the pod tastes of almost nothing anyone would call chocolate, being bitter and astringent, slippery with the white pulp around it, with no chocolate flavour in it at all. That flavour has to be built, and the building begins while the bean is still wet. The flavours in a chocolate are achieved by following a step-by-step process which includes Fermentation, Drying, Roasting, and a later treatment called Alakalisation. 

Fermentation comes first. The wet beans are heaped up in their own pulp and left to warm for several days. As the pulp breaks down, heat and acidity work inwards through the shell and break the seed’s proteins apart into amino acids and small peptides, the precursors from which every chocolate flavour is later assembled. Nothing at this stage smells of chocolate; what has been made is the raw material for it.

Drying follows, and finishes what fermentation started. The beans are spread out to remove their moisture their moisture. Drying stops the fermentation at the point the maker wants it stopped, and it carries off the sharp acids the pulp gives out. For example, Cocoacraft chocolates use beans that are sun-dried for seven days before moving to the roasting process. A well dried bean smells clean; an underdried one smells like vinegar.

Roasting is where the flavour finally appears. Held between 120 and 140°C, the amino acids and sugars built up over the previous fortnight react together in the browning reaction that also gives bread its crust and coffee its  Maillard reaction. The result is the smell most people would name, with their eyes shut, as chocolate.

Roasting can only develop what fermentation and drying have already made, so a badly fermented bean stays flat and sharp however carefully it is roasted afterwards. A bar that gives nothing back is rarely a bar that was roasted badly; it is a bar whose flavour was never built in the first place.

One further treatment sits outside that chain. Alkalisation, more often called Dutch processing, treats the nib or the liquor with an alkali to take the edge off cocoa's acidity. It deepens the colour, softens the bitterness, and turns the taste rounder and steadier. Alkalisation also flattens the differences made by fermentation and drying. Heavily alkalised cocoa keeps under a fifth of its flavanols — the naturally occurring compounds that carry a large part of a bean's character.

Cocoacraft chocolate is never alkalised. We use conching to deal with the acidity. Grinding and turning the chocolate for two days in the conche drives the sharp volatile acids off on their own while the flavour rounds out. Nothing is neutralised and the bean retains the fine flavour notes and the flavanols.

How to taste chocolate, step by step

For chocolate tastings, conditions matter more than technique. The chocolate should be at room temperature, around 20°C, because the aromas stay locked in the fat until it begins to soften, and a bar taken straight from the fridge will taste different than one at ideal temperature.

Also, just like coffee, tea and anything sweet, the chocolate’s flavour tends to sit on the palate and changes with each subsequent bite. Three or four bars is as much as a palate will manage in a sitting, before it starts to blur one bar into the next. This can be a practical problem with chocolate tasting at home, where if you aren’t pacing the session and it is easy to carry on past the point of usefulness.

Here are the things to look for when tasting chocolate.

Look

An even surface with a soft shine and a deep brown colour with some warmth in it is what a well-made bar should show.

A dull grey film or pale streaking across the surface is bloom, which forms when chocolate has been warmed and cooled and the cocoa butter has separated and recrystallised where it can be seen. You may have noticed it on chocolates that are stored in the fridge for long periods of time. Bloom is harmless to eat, and it means the bar spent time somewhere warm; the texture underneath it will usually be grainy.

Snap

A piece broken close to the ear gives a clean, sharp sound in a well-made dark chocolate; that sound is a test of temper. Cocoa butter can be set into several different crystal forms, and only one of them, known as Form V, produces a bar that is firm, glossy and snaps cleanly. Coaxing cocoa butter into that one form is achieved by tempering. A bar that bends, crumbles or sounds soft was either tempered poorly or has been too warm since. Milk and white chocolate carry more fat and less cocoa solid, so they snap more softly and should be judged more gently; the differences between the types show up in the tasting too.

Aroma

Warming a piece between the fingers for a moment and bringing it to the nose releases the aromas, and this is often where the first real flavour shows.

Most of what is casually called taste is smell, arriving through the back of the nose while the tongue reports sweet or bitter flavouring. A bar smelled cold gives up far less aroma than the same bar smelled warm. Notes of added fruit tend to show here, or nuts, or simply the dry earthy cocoa note.

The melt

A piece rested against the roof of the mouth and left alone is where the flavour actually arrives, and it is the step almost everybody skips.

Cocoa butter melts at about 34°C, a little below blood heat, which is a property nearly unique among natural fats and the reason chocolate behaves as it does on the tongue. As the fat gives way it releases its flavour compounds in sequence, one wave and then another. A good bar arrives across twenty or thirty seconds, often bright at the front, rounder in the middle, and settling at the end into the flavour of the bean itself. Chewing collapses that whole sequence into a single blunt impression of sweetness and bitterness, which is why a chewed bar so often seems to hold no flavour when the flavour was there all along and simply never given time to arrive.

The texture too changes during the wait. Good chocolate turns silky and coats the tongue evenly, while a waxy slick or a chalky drag points to vegetable fat in place of cocoa butter, or to grinding that stopped too early.

The finish

What remains after swallowing is the finish, and it is where a bar earns a second purchase.

Some chocolate vanishes the moment it is gone. Some leave a lingering cocoa aroma that carries on for a minute or more, and the length of that is a fair measure of the cocoa underneath. The bitterness shifts as it goes, fading cleanly in some bars and turning harsh at the close in others; and a bar that produces something new in the finish, a note that was not there in the middle, is doing something that most chocolate cannot.

Words to describe chocolate taste

The obstacle for a beginner chocolate taster at this point is usually vocabulary. Most people taste something perfectly real, find no word for it, and settle for saying the chocolate was nice.

Chocolate judges and makers get past this with a small shared set of families, and the useful words to describe chocolate taste are fewer than the exercise suggests.

A bar may show fruit, either fresh and bright towards red berries and citrus, or dried and darker towards raisin and fig. It may show nuts, from something green and almondy through to a deeper roasted hazelnut. It may show caramel, or malt, or a warm biscuity sweetness sitting underneath everything else. Beyond those there is spice, which in cocoa is usually a dry warmth answering to no spice a cook would name. There are flowers, rare and easily missed, and there is earth, wood and plain roasted cocoa, where a great many bars comfortably settle.

Choosing the family is enough to begin with, and deciding that something is fruity is useful long before it can be said which fruit. Next to the flavour there is how the chocolate behaves in the mouth, described well by a handful of terms that are easier to be certain about, among them a clean finish, balanced bitterness, an elegant melt and a creamy texture.

Keeping chocolate tasting notes as the session goes on takes a moment, and three or four words for each bar is plenty; writing a flavour down is what fixes it in the memory, and a flavour named once is found far more easily the next time.

A flight of four: 52%, 70%, 85% and 99.5%

Bars tasted alongside each other teach more than any bar tasted alone, since differences register more readily than qualities. A flight is worked upward, from the sweetest to the most bitter, because going the other way leaves the palate unable to find anything in what follows.

Our own dark range makes a straightforward ladder of four, and the character we publish for each is a reasonable guide to what a taster should expect to meet.

The number on the front of a bar records how much of it is cocoa, and therefore how little of it is sugar, which makes it a measure of sweetness and not of quality. Quality is settled much earlier, at the ferment and at the roast. A carefully made 70% will give a taster more to work with than a careless 99.5%.

How the place and the process impact chocolate taste

Where the beans grew and what was done to them account for almost everything a taster finds, which is why the same method applied to two bars can produce markedly different results.

At Cocoacraft our cocoa comes from Idukki in Kerala, where it grows among coconut, arecanut, nutmeg, cardamom, pepper, and fruits including banana, jackfruit, pineapple, passionfruit and avocado. After fermentation and drying, we roast and hull the beans to draw out the nibs. The chocolate is then slow-conched, which is the long gentle stirring that removes the astringency of the cocoa bean, while retaining its finer flavour.

That last decision is the reason why each batch of Cocoacraft chocolates represent the taste of one particular season, preserved as the harvest made it and not engineered toward a house formula. All our chocolate contains 37% cocoa butter, a high proportion, and much of the slow even melt described earlier comes from exactly that.

Also Read: Best Dark Chocolate in India – City Wise Buying Guide

Where a tasting goes wrong

Five habits account for most disappointing sessions, and none of them has anything to do with skill.

Chocolate straight from the refrigerator will taste muted every time. A chewed piece hides the sequence that the tasting was arranged to find. Opening at 85% leaves nothing else properly tasteable for the rest of the session, and a sweet coffee beforehand will make an entirely good bar read as sour. And waiting for one clear flavour guarantees that the interesting part goes unnoticed. Each of the five is a habit of hurrying, and the cure for all of them is simply to slow down.

FAQ

Q1. How do you properly taste chocolate or what are the criteria for chocolate tasting?

Ans. Let it melt on the tongue for half a minute without chewing. In full, bring the piece to room temperature, look at its surface, snap it near the ear, warm it between the fingers to smell it, then rest it on the tongue. Cocoa butter melts near blood heat, so the flavour arrives across twenty or thirty seconds, in waves. The finish, meaning whatever lingers after swallowing, is usually what separates an ordinary bar from one worth buying again.

Q2. Why can I not taste anything in my chocolate?

Ans. Three things account for most cases. The chocolate may be too cold, with its aromas still locked in the fat. It may have been chewed, which collapses the whole sequence into sweetness and bitterness. Or the beans were poorly fermented, in which case there is genuinely little in the bar to find.

Q3. Should chocolate be stored in the fridge?

Ans. Better kept out of it. A cool, dry cupboard between 15°C and 20°C suits chocolate well. Refrigeration invites condensation, which can leave a dull grey bloom across the surface, and chocolate taken straight from the cold tastes flat because the fat has not begun to soften.

Q4. How much chocolate should you taste in one sitting?

Ans. Three or four bars is plenty. A palate that has already met several bars stops telling one from the next, leaving only its own tiredness to register. Water and a plain cracker between samples will stretch a session a little further.