We eat chocolate often, sometimes every day, but do you really know what kind of chocolate you like? What percent? What brand? What flavour? What region?
Get ready for all those Valentines Chocolates with a one-hour crash course Chocolate tasting class led by Eagranie Yuh, the Well-Tempered Chocolatier.
How to taste chocolate in five steps
In this compact class, participants learn how to analyze chocolate by looking, sniffing, snapping, melting and tasting.
Dark chocolate samples at Elysian Cafe
Look
Six different samples of dark chocolate are laid out for examination in the blind chocolate tasting. As per the guidelines, the first step is to examine the chocolate with your eyes.
Chocolates have a large range of colours from creamy white to milky brown to deep brownish reds and even purples.
Smell
Smelling the chocolate was the second step. By sniffing the chocolates, sometimes you can detect a preview of the flavours held within. They can be sweet, fruity, earthy, smoky, bitter or even sour.
Cacao beans
Listen
The next step, is examining the snap. Each chocolate has a different snapping sound when you first bite into it. Some are softer, usually the chocolates with more added ingredients such as milk chocolates, and some are crisper, breaking with a cleaner, louder snap.
Melt
Next is the melting. During this step, you examine the texture of the chocolate. Is it smooth? Grainy? Thick? Dry? The chocolate also gives off the initial flavours during this stage and you can begin to experience the first notes.
Eagranie's chocolate tasting class
Taste
Last is the taste. Now that you’ve allowed the chocolate to melt on your tongue for a few moments, you can begin to chew into the chocolate. Here you will start to taste the other flavour profiles that you may have missed upon first biting into the chocolate. Depending on the origin and the maker, chocolates can have a wide range of different flavour profiles and tasting notes.
This may all seem a little pretentious, treating chocolate as if it were a glass of wine, swishing and swirling it around your mouth. However, as you go through the tasting process, you begin to realize that chocolate has an abundance of different flavours you never noticed before.
Dark chocolate samples and drinking chocolate
The goal of this class may have been to help you try and figure out what chocolate you really like, but what you truly gain is an appreciation of the different varieties of chocolate. They all look the same and they’re all dark chocolate, but a bar from Madagascar can have fruitier tastes with a spicy finish while a bar of dark chocolate from Ecuador will have an earthier flavour with floral notes.
Who knew that plain, dark chocolate could have so many flavours? Check out one of Eagranie’s chocolate classes for a pre-Valentines date to get in the mood.
There will be one more chocolate tasting classes offered by Eagranie at Elysian Cafe on February 10th, 2012. Eagranie also offers chocolate classes at Xoxolat.