The Details of Chocolate
We’ve collected some of our notes here and hope to expand on these as we learn more.
One of the things we love most about chocolate is how interesting it is. The final bar depends on many tiny details that happen during the chocolate-making process. Even once it’s tempered, the flavor continues to evolve in fun and unexpected ways.
Chocolate, like coffee and wine, has a considerable amount of variance in flavor.
Commercial chocolate is homogenized to all taste like, well, only chocolate. In our tests, we’ve seen the incredible favors that emerge from different varieties, roasts, and pairings. As we continue our studies, we invite you to discover with us some of what makes chocolates different.
Chocolate can taste like far more than chocolate.
Flavor
Our flavor wheel focuses on unique flavors that we’ve encountered in our bars or could be present in chocolate.
Using the flavor wheel: Start in the center, select a category you taste and refine outwards to get a specific flavor note. Multiple trips through the wheel can help extract multiple tasting notes. Feel free to create your own descriptor if you don’t see it here!
Sourcing
Where the chocolate is grown, and how it’s handled through harvest, fermentation, and drying, can greatly affect the flavor of the final chocolate.
This all happens before we receive the beans, and thus places great importance on sourcing. We only source our beans through ethical suppliers with focus on quality, to verify that the beans get to us with great potential for unique flavors.
Color
Color and Flavor
Early in our chocolate making career, we noticed all chocolates have a distinct color. By using a home built spectrometer, we’ve started to quantify the color of the chocolate. What appears as shades of brown often hides interesting spectral features, especially when compared to a baseline dark chocolate. These features can indicate the presence of certain flavors, but considerable data will be required to correlate the flavors with the spectral features.
Initial Findings
With small sample sizes, we’ve found chocolates that look extra dark tend to have more blue/purple than baseline, and extra chocolatey notes. Green seems to come with nut flavors (though not exclusively) and red and NIR tend to be present with fruit-forward chocolates, which often are visibly ruddier. More data can give these notes more confidence, or change them entirely. We will update this page with our findings.