How to taste chocolate with your five senses
How to eat chocolate with all five of your senses
By now, we’re hoping you’ve all tried most of our bean to bar chocolate – and if not, what are you waiting for?!
So today we’d like to talk you through how to eat chocolate with your five senses – something that can only be truly done with authentic bean to bar chocolate!
Grab some chocolate and let's walk through the steps.
Sight
Have a good look at your bar, do you see that nice shine? The shine is an easy way to tell if a chocolate bar is high quality or not. Each batch of our chocolate has been stone ground for three consecutive days to get it to the smooth consistency that it is. It has also been expertly tempered (a process of delicate temperature manipulation of the chocolate to break down large cocoa butter crystals within it). This stabilises the chocolate and prevents it from melting on your fingertips as soon as you touch it. This process, when done correctly, results in smooth, glossy chocolate. Poor quality/poorly tempered chocolate will have a matt finish, will melt easily and may even be crumbly.
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Sound
Now break a piece off and listen carefully, do you hear that clear snap? Chocolate that doesn’t make a very specific snapping sound when its broken, or even worse, if it bends rather than breaks, is not high-quality. Cheap ingredients such as low-quality fats, emulsifiers etc as well as a low cocoa percentage mean the chocolate is likely to bend or crumble rather than snap. Avoid this chocolate!
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Touch
How does it feel to touch, smooth, rough, grainy? We conch (stone grind) our chocolate for three days, non-stop, to make sure that it is as smooth as bean to bar chocolate can possibly be.
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Smell
Hold the chocolate to your nose and take a deep breath in, you may be able to pick out some distinct flavours before you have a taste. Lots of mass-produced chocolate companies will flavour their bars using vanilla or other flavour additives to cover the taste of poor quality/badly roasted beans. So often you will get a strong vanilla, overly-sweet aroma from your chocolate, and as nice as this may be in terms of general scents, we're not making room freshener, we’re making chocolate! We believe that high quality cocoa beans speak for themselves and do not need flavour additives/enhancers. When you smell our chocolate, you will get a rich, cocoa smell, that will vary with subtle additional aromas depending on the bean origin.
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Taste
Take a piece and place it on your tongue, let it melt; take note of the flavour journey you go on. You may start with one flavour and end with an entirely different one. You won’t get this kind of depth of flavour or flavour journey with mass-produced chocolate and once you’ve experienced just how different the flavour profiles and quality of bean to bar chocolate is, you will never be able to go back to mass-produced, generic chocolate.
OR
You could ignore all this, rip open that wrapper and get cracking!
Enjoy!
From Ama, Megan, Chile and Susan
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