Tasting Chocolates
Posted by tewfic in Chocolate Articles
know the difference between quality chocolate and chocolates that use substitute ingredients.
The Five Sense TestTo taste — be it chocolate, wine, tea, coffee or cheese — you need to engage all five senses.
1. Use Your Eyes
Look at the piece of chocolate you are about to taste, evaluating its texture before you put it in your mouth. The surface should be smooth and shiny, indicating that the cocoa butter is properly crystallised (tempered). Do not be swayed by the colour. There are few rules about what colour is best, and the shade of chocolate colour is influenced by many factors such as bean type and roasting time as well as milk content.
2. Touch It
Is it soft or hard? Sticky, grainy, sandy or velvety? Crisp orcrunchy? Getting to know the feel of a chocolate will help you recognise it again ill the future, It will also help youto identify quality. The smoother the texture, the more unctuous it will be ill the mouth. The finer the chocolate’s particles, the greater the aromas you will find in it.
3. Listen to it
Even your ability to hear affects taste — and loss of hearing can give the impression that a food has a strange taste. Tuning in to the sound that your chocolate makes when you break it is another way of familiarising yourself with the product, and assessing its quality. Did it break easily? Neatly? A chocolate that snaps without too much effort is asign that the balance between cocoa and butter is right. Dark chocolate snaps more easily than milk because, unlike milk chocolate, it contains no milk powder.
4. Smell It
Taste is ninety per cent smell. Our sensing equipment seen is to pick up subtleties in aroma or vapour that we cannot detect in solids and liquids. You will have noticed that food is more tasteless when you have a cold and your nose is blocked up. You may even lose your appetite for it because the surface there is nothing to savour.
The vapour given off by food or drink and warmed up in the mouth has two routes to the brain. When we sniff it, with the aim of taking in its odour, the vapour travels up our nose to the olfactory receptors at the top. When we are taste, the same vapour takes a back route, from the back of the mouth, up what’s called the retro-nasal passage, to the same sensory organ. To test the affect that smell has on taste, try holding your nose and chewing a piece of flavoursome food. Then repeat the same exercise with your nose liberated. Our Sense of smell is a bit like a memory bank. You know yourself how the smell of freshly cut grass may bring back memories of your childhood, how the scent of freshly shelled peas can take you back to your grandniot~~~~5 kitchen in the summer, and how the smell of perfume or aftershave can remind you of the loved one who wears it. (Eau Sauvagealways brings back thoughts of my father, for example.) It takes practice to describe a chocolate’s ‘nose~ but we do so by relating aromas to those in our past experience ‘The morewe penetrate odours,’ observed the great twentieth century perfumer and Philosopher Edmond Roudnitska, ‘the more they end up Possessing us. They live within us, becoming anintegral part 0f a new function within us.The problem is that, in today’s world, we are so bombarded by artificial smells that many of us have lost our database of natural scents. Sadly, when a lot of people smella fine chocolate for the first time, they do not recognise it as chocolate For them, chocolate should smell of sugar and vanilla! But practice makes perfect to coin a clichéGood cocoa smells often remind us of natural products fruit, flowers woodlands or Spice. A chocolate that smells smoky may have been carelessly dried. One that smellsmouldy has been damaged in storage You can build up your database of Smells by using your nose whenever and wherever you can not only when you are smelling chocolateexperience the scents of wet weather If you’re in the woods, smell the soil and the leaves. Breathe in the odour of a tree trunk. ~1en you go to the market, take a Sniff of each
basket of mushrooms, herbs, fruit and flowers. Do all this and you will rediscover the potential of your sense of smell. We all have the ability, but many of us have forgotten it.
5.Taste It
When tasting a new chocolate, try just a small, fingernail- sized piece. Put it on your tongue and chew for a few seconds to break it into smaller chunks. Then stop and allow it to melt SO that all flavours are released. Make sure the chocolate is spread all around your mouth — this way you’ll taste the flavours most intensely.
When the taste of a wonderful chocolate reverberates long after we have consumed the chocolate, that indicates our olfactory system is going into overdrive. Our taste buds playa relatively minor role, picking up only crude definitions: sweet, acid, salty and bitter. When you start tasting truly good chocolate, you will find that its flavour can linger for many minutes. This is the best incentive I can think of to invest in an expensive bar. It may cost three times as much as your usual bar, but the pleasure you’ll get from it is intense and long.
