Chocolate taste analysis leads to remarkable results
Posted by tewfic in Chocolate News
During Choco-Laté, The Bruges chocolate Festival, 4 food specialists from Bruges created 5 new chocolates and combined them with 5 matching wines.
Taste and language
What do you taste if you flavour a food product, a drink or a dish? The question is more easily posed than answered, because taste and language make a difficult marriage. There are various reasons for this.
First of all, what you taste is seldom a precise specification, but rather a palette of tastes: a combination of tastes which may or may not form a harmonious whole.
2. Furthermore, taste is never constant. It varies according to the moment: the bite, the slow chewing or the after-taste.
3. The question ‘What do you taste?’ assumes that there is some jargon to label the taste impressions precisely. It also assumes that this jargon is as rich as the taste palette itself. Sadly, this is not the case. Most languages have little or no vocabulary to define tastes. French has quite a rich range of jargon, but poverty is king in Dutch. Apart from linguistic factors, the wealth of words to define taste also varies according to the culinary field of interest. Viticulturists, for example, have developed a rich universal jargon to define the taste of wine in all its facets. Laurel spiciness, cut grass, and bitter sweet which blends into the after-taste.
22 specific flavours of chocolate
The fact that viticulturists have a whole range of refined jargon at their disposal to define the taste of wine has caused other food specialists to pose the question as to whether they too could use this existing jargon for other tasty delights such as chocolate. This soon turned out to be impossible. Indeed, chocolate has touches of flavour which have never been found in wine. An example of this is the smell/taste of whisky, which you can taste in some chocolates, but not in wine.
Each combination is balanced and in harmony. The mix of flavours was just perfect
Each food product and each drink has a number of unique tastes. The Belcolade and Puratos R & D department also discovered this during scientific research over 5 years into the unique flavour profile of chocolate. They baptized the results of their research ‘les Arômes de Cyrano’: a collection of 22 unique flavours, classified into 7 categories (see below). The 22 flavours give everyone the opportunity to discover and define the flavours typical of chocolate. It is interesting to note that these 22 flavours do not make up a definitive list, but only represent the current state of affairs. And so, there is a real chance of even more flavours being added in the future.
Remarkable experiment
On the occasion of the Choco-Laté festival, Belcolade invited 4 food professionals from Bruges to join forces and use their knowledge of ‘les Arômes de Cyrano’ to create 5 chocolates, each of which would make a perfect match for 1 particular sort of wine. The 4 specialists from Bruges were Dominique Personne (The Chocolate Line), Guy Van Neste (Restaurant ’t Pandreitje), Patrick Devos (Restaurant Patrick Devos) and Michel Vanacker (Wijnhandel Feys & Vanacker). It goes without saying that the 5 creations and combinations (see below) are extraordinary, but there is more to it. Quite apart from the notions ‘tasty or not’, ‘exotic or not’, and ‘marketable or not’, it has to be said that each combination is balanced and in harmony. In other words, the mix of flavours was just perfect. This is quite remarkable.To Taste Chocolate Click Here
