This page is a Work In Progress – feel free to make your own edits/additions.
Goal: Provide a series of guided tastings to get new recruits acquainted with craft chocolate.
The tastings below will list explicit bars, but substitutions within the same realm should be totally fine. They’re provided in a relatively sensible progression, but obviously you can go at it however you want. So far, I’ve divided the tastings into 3 different tracks:
Iconic good craft chocolate bars. These are all tasty and is just a great way to get into chocolate.
Chocolate is a crop similar to wine. Where the bean grows will impact its flavor dramatically. Learn the differences by trying some single origin chocolate bars where the only difference between them is where the beans came from.
Obviously, what you put in your chocolate makes a huge difference. Let’s do a quick journey of different styles of chocolate that vary on ingredients.
The bean and ingredients are not the whole story. Different chocolate makers make their chocolate differently. Let’s try chocolate bars with the same beans and percentages but made by different chocolate makers to get an idea of how different the outcomes can be. Feel free to use a different origin, Madagascar is just easy to find.
Marou is a chocolate maker that makes different chocolate bars, all from Vietnam, but different parts of Vietnam. Though a small country, you can really taste the differences the different terroir of Vietnam brings to the final flavor of the chocolate.
Like all other ingredients, milk can not just vary in quality, but also also in source. Trying different chocolate bars with different kinds of milk really lets you appreciate how diverse milk can be and how the different flavors play with each other with chocolate.
Same origin, percentage, and maker, but different conching and roasting. Conching and roasting are some of the major contributors of flavor apart from the bean itself. Let’s explore what knobs chocolate makers are twisting when experimenting on the different lengths of conching and roasting.
Similar to wine, the same grapes from the same region will vary year over year. Likewise, chocolate made from the same beans from the same region will vary from harvest to harvest. Let’s see if we can start picking out these minor influences in flavor.
First try the raw ingredients that go into making chocolate.
Now repeat tasting #103 and try to pick out the different ingredients in each bar.
Fermentation and Drying are arguably the most important steps in flavor development for cocoa beans that takes place at the farm. Unfortunately, I have no bar suggestions here, as it’s hard to come by short-fermented vs long-fermented beans, as they’re often considered bad. But if you happen to find chocolate with different fermentation styles or drying styles, it’s worth having an educated taste on!
If you’ve managed to go through the other tasting classes and are excited for more, then you might be interested in taking your hand into making chocolate from scratch! You can do as much or as little of the process as you’d like depending on where you’d get started (from unroasted beans, roasted beans, cocoa nibs, or a block of cocoa liquor). Wherever you start from, with the addition of some sugar and other ingredients, you can go through the process of refining, tempering, and molding your own chocolate bars! We will explore every step of the process and how different changes in the process affect the finished product.
There’s many guides out there on how to go about making chocolate at home yourself. The two that are fairly commonly referenced are the following:
Chocolate making involves a refining step that can take anywhere from 12-48 hours, and therefore, expect to spend at least 2 full days. However, because chocolate making has many variables subject to experimentation, you should pad your schedule up to 4 days.