41. How to Taste Chocolate

(Epistemic status: My favored method. You do you; I'm not your real dad or even your fake dad... but also, I do have any experience with careful analysis of flavors.)

There's a difference between ordinary dark chocolate and truly good dark chocolate, but just as listening to a good piece of music on a phone speaker while distracted is a very different experience to listening to the same piece of music through a decent pair of headphones while dedicating your full attention to the song. In that spirit, here's how I recommend getting the most out of the kind of chocolate that exists to be taken in as some kind of coherent artful multifaceted Work, rather than as simply a pleasant one-note snack. (Not that there's anything wrong with the snack kind! Snacks are important! And you can still do this process with the snack kind; it'll just be less interesting.)

Note that the method I describe is by no means limited to "pure" dark chocolate (as opposed to, say, dark chocolate with fruit or other flavorful adjuncts), or even to chocolate or sweets at all. You could try to do the same thing with any kind of food; in its fullest generality this is called "mindful eating".

Before I talk through the process, an overarching note on the way I recommend breaking down a smell/taste experience. Some people who have written guides for how to taste chocolate focus on the obvious sorts of experiences and descriptors - sweetness, different kinds of flower or fruit or spice notes, acidity, astringency, that kind of thing; the kind of term you might find in wine tasting notes. Others prefer to write some kind of flash fiction about the subjective experience, trying to paint a picture of what it's like to be you, experiencing this chocolate. Both kinds of tasters report fairly high levels of repeatability and consistency in the kinds of things people say or write when they make words about the chocolate. I think that both approaches are limited - talking about obvious food flavors alone misses some of the stranger and more wonderful things that a chocolate can put you in mind of, but if you write down something about how the chocolate makes you think of a bustling marketplace that's not going to help someone else know what it's like to eat the chocolate or whether they'll like it.

In that spirit, I go for a kind of Graham-Schmidt or PCA decomposition when I produce words about a chocolate I'm tasting. I start with the clearest factors, like sweetness, acidity, and astringency. Then I move to broad classes of clear food flavors - is it fruity? (and if so, jammy, or fresh?) caramelized? coffee-like? floral? - and then keep digging into slightly narrower classes - stone fruit? dark roast? - and usually even spend some time trying to narrow in on precisely which (e.g.) stone fruit. ("Ah! It's cherry! ...No, wait, plum. ...Pluot?") Having a good mental library of flavors and smells comes in clutch here; if you've never poked at that aspect of your mental proscenium, now's a good time to start developing that particular muscle. Focusing (in the Gendlin sense) is a tool par excellence here, too: poke at your heart, at your felt sense, and don't give up doing that until something feels like it's clicked correctly into place. (It's a hard sensation to describe more clearly than that. You'll probably know it when you feel it.) Next, what about non-food flavors? Tobacco, leather, woods like oak or pine or maple, minerals, petrichor - again, the kinds of terms you might see in a wine catalog. The sky's the limit here, as long as it feels correct and refers to something real. Finally, if you're moved to write some imagist poetry about the chocolate, now's the time. Are you put in mind of a sailing ship? What kind? Do you feel strongly like this is some mythical creature's favorite food? Which, then? Are you struck by the image of a desolate city, or tranquil woods, or a bustling marketplace? Write that, then. Have you been struck by a suddenly unlocked memory from a decade ago? Say as much, Marcel, and have yourself another madeleine.

Now for procedure. I divide the experience of tasting chocolate into four major sections, experienced in order: Nose, Head, Heart, and Tail. Less succinctly and less accurately - the smell, the onset of the flavor, the main flavor, and the aftertaste. You probably want to blow your nose thoroughly first, and have a glass of water on hand. (Sparkling and very cold with lemon is best, in my experience, but any relatively flavorless water is fine.)

For the Nose, smell the chocolate. Make sure to warm it up first, either holding it in your mouth or in your hand. My favorite technique is to hold it delicately between my teeth, half in and half out of my mouth, and gently breathing out past it, slow and hot. Once the chocolate is warm, get your nose right next to the chocolate and sniff deeply. If you feel like you're getting too used to the smell, take a break and smell something neutral; some people like to sniff coffee beans, but my go-to is to bury my nose in my (clean!) sleeve, in the crook of my elbow. In any case, puff out a bit of air to finish palate(?)-cleansing and get back to it. Produce some words about the delicate intricacies of the scent.

Next, the Head. Break the chocolate in half, if you like. Hold some chocolate in your mouth without chewing and let it melt, like properly-tempered chocolate does just shy of body temperature. You might gently rub the chocolate against your tongue, or the roof of your mouth. As the chocolate softens, produce some words about the very start of the taste - is it sweet or bitter? tart? astringent? What notes arise early? How do they blend and play off against each other?

Then comes the Heart. You might fold the chocolate over on itself now that it's soft enough, or hold it in place with your tongue and alveolar ridge as you suck on it. Start biting it a little bit, gently at first. What are the main notes of the chocolate? How good is it at being a complicated dark chocolate experience? Notice the retronasal olfaction you get from the bits of melted chocolate in your saliva as you swallow a little. Produce some words about that.

Finally, the Tail. Start actually swallowing bits of the chocolate, and notice what the aftertaste and full-on retronasal olfaction are like. What does the chocolate leave behind as it goes, or in its absence? What is the silence that follows it like? Produce some words about the end of this tiny experience. Possibly also write a little about the overall valence - did you like it? did you have anything come up for you in experiencing it? who would you recommend this chocolate to, if anyone?

At this point, if you broke the chocolate in half at the start and didn't get enough information on your first go-round, it's best to drink some water and repeat the three main chocolate-tasting steps (Head, Heart, Tail) above. If you plan to taste more than one chocolate, an obvious but crucial piece of advice is to palate-cleanse in between each time - drink some water, swish it around in your mouth, clear your nose again, and so forth.

In a future post I might provide some worked examples from out of my cupboard. I want to see your own tasting notes in this style!