Chloé Doutre-Roussel, a chocolate connosieur, eats over a pound of chocolate a day, selects chocolate bars depending on her mood, and resists all other sweets that aren't true to the traditional form of chocolate.
Pretty awesome if you ask me.
http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/1755cho fun site that ranks chocolate bars...
http://www.seventypercent.com/chocop/bar_detail.asp
i tried amedei's toscano blacks 70%, 66%, and 63% today and felt that the 66% bar was the smoothest out of the three.
just checked the rankings for 'em and the 66% had the highest score.
i feel the connosieurship coming soon... veryyyyy soooooon
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Words you need to understand
12 Beans. The seed of a fruit called the cocoa pod and the main ingredient in chocolate. The trees grow only in areas that are always warm and humid.
13 Liquor/cacao mass. Beans roasted, peeled and ground become a thick dark mass. The liquor is slightly acidic and astringent, and the aromas are still not at their full potential. They require further processing.
14 Couverture/bulk chocolate. Couverture" is the same as "bulk chocolate" but adjusted to a lower viscosity than that sold specifically for making bars.
15 Criollo. A variety of cacao tree that has almost disappeared. It is impossible at the moment to isolate enough to make a chocolate bar. Any mention of Criollo on packaging or promotional material should be translated into Trinitario. Even blue chip companies (ab)use these word.
16 Trinitario. A hybrid between the forastero and criollo, this has the production and disease resistance of the Forastero and much of the fine flavour of the Criollo, making it a commercial favourite. It grows in the Americas, Madagascar and Indonesia.
17 Forastero. These trees produce cacao beans with rustic and flat aromas. Africa provides more than 80% of the world's cacao beans and all of it is forastero.
18 White chocolate. It is not legally chocolate in the world of chocolate connoisseurs. It is confectionery.
19 Blue chip brands. These are the classics every connoisseur needs to know and must to be able to recognise "blind". They all work from the bean and employ staff who hunt for a regular, quality supply. In alphabetical order, the brands are: Amedei, Bonnat, Domori, Felchlin, Michel Cluizel, Pralus, Scharffen Berger, and Valrhona. There are many new brands working from the beans all over the world, mainly in the US and Italy, and all are worth trying at least once: De Vries, Coppeneur, Theo Chocolates, Amano are good examples. You will most likely have to purchase them online.
20 Tasting. Tasting is not eating. Tasting requires that you are in state where your mind and body are alert, sharp and ready to listen to the subtleties of the chocolate.
Tasting
To taste you need to engage all five senses. It might seem obvious, but don't do it after smoking or eating a big meal, or when you're tired or stressed.
21 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 colour. The shade is influenced by many factors, such as bean type and roasting time as well as milk content.
22 Touch it. Is it sticky, grainy, sandy or velvety? Crisp or crunchy? A floury texture suggests cocoa powder has been added, a sign of poor quality chocolate. A clayey feel in the mouth tells you there are probably many particles of too small a size (the ideal is 16/18 microns) or that the proportion of cocoa butter added is high. The ideal texture is the one that melts smoothly.
23 Listen to it. Did it break easily? Neatly? Drily? A chocolate that snaps without too much effort is a sign 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.
24 Smell it. Taste is 90% smell. It takes practice to describe a chocolate's "nose", but we do so by relating aromas to those in our past experience. The problem is that we are so bombarded by artificial smells that we have lost our database of natural scents. Sadly, when a lot of people smell a fine chocolate for the first time, they do not recognise it as chocolate, because for them, chocolate should smell of sugar and vanilla. Fine chocolate, just like wine, can be described by referring to natural products around us - fruit, flowers, woodlands or spice. A chocolate that smells smoky may have been carelessly dried. One that smells mouldy has been damaged in storage. You can build up your database of smells by using your nose whenever you can. Experience the scents of wet weather. If you're in the woods, smell the soil and the leaves. When 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.
25 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.
Flavours
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. Fine chocolate has harmonious tastes - you'll need to concentrate to sense their presence. Look out in particular for bitterness, acidity and astringency. The first two are welcome, but astringency is a bad sign, often found in poor quality chocolate, and indicates poor fermentation.
26 Sweetness. My simple rule is this: if you notice the sugar, there is too much of it in the bar. Excess sugar is used to disguise poor quality or uninteresting beans, covering up the burnt, metallic or mouldy flavours you might otherwise taste. Sugar is needed to reveal aromas, however; cocoa butter has the same effect. To make a fine chocolate, brands need to find the optimal level of sugar that reveals the aromatic palette of the beans used at their best.
27 Bitterness, sourness and acidity. When I introduce novices to real chocolate, many use the word "bitter" to describe it. It's the same word that often springs to people's lips when tasting tea or coffee. It is their way of qualifying a new, more intense taste, but nine times out of 10, it is not the most accurate word. Poor quality chocolate may be astringent or acidic. True bitterness is felt in the middle at the back of the tongue. Test it in foods like chicory or grapefruit. Guanaja from Valrhona is rather bitter, but a mild and elegant way. With some training, you'll even detect chocolates that begin with one flavour (sweetness, for instance) and evolve to another (say, bitterness) with a hint of a third (salty) - like Lindt 99%.
28 Saltiness. Salt is not often added to chocolate but you can find it in some filled chocolates (it enhances the nuttiness in pralines) or in bars like Domori's Latte Sal or 99% Lindt. Here it would be used to reveal particular aromas from the beans or the nuts.
29 Describing aromas and flavours. The last part of tasting consists in finding the words to describe aromas and flavours you detect. This is hard as we are not used to associating a word with a taste sensation. I suggest you proceed as for a wine tasting: try to find associations with the world around you. The tasting wheel below will help. Try it - take a square of Valrhona's Manjari. Pop a small piece into your mouth and once the initial burst of acidity recedes, see if you can notice the clear red fruit notes. In the beginning, if you can at least identify "fruity", that is excellent. Later on, as your ability to identify flavours and aromas grows, you'll be able to fit more specific words to tastes. You can move from tasting Java from Pralus as "vegetable" to something more accurate, for instance, wood or a wet forest. Find words that sum up what you taste, not what you think you should taste. On a graph, you could draw up one curve for the "intensity" of the flavours, in their initial attack, in their development, and in their finish. You may taste "flowery" followed by "woody" and then "woody flirting with spicy".
30 Soon all these steps will become second nature. You won't have to think about it, you will just enjoy the delightful part of the journey - the excitement and desire, then the delightful, intense and sensual indulgence. And you can reproduce this experience as many times as you wish, for as many years as you wish.
