Joe Ray

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Seeking Chocolate Harmony

Many of you who wanted to know why I would suck lemons with the pros, but not taste chocolate with them. You’ll be happy to know that I have bowed to reader pressure. I’ve now sat in on two straight weeks of tasting Modican chocolate.

It’s unique stuff. Most notably, it tends to be quite granular due to a low cooking temperature that leaves the sugar in crystal form until you’ve had it in your mouth. When it lets go, seemingly all at once, it does it in a flood of sweet goodness.

The typical flavors for the chocolate can range from near straight-up cacao to something with a fiery pepper flavor, but it can also have toasty or even herbal notes; defining what these flavors are and whether or not they are a good thing is the testers’ job.

A couple things struck me right off the bat:

It’s hard work. After five years in France, I’ve never been to a wine tasting so meticulous and scientific in its pursuit to define what’s in your mouth as what the chocolate tasters pursue. Sometimes, you ask someone a question before looking at them, only to realize their eyes are rolled up in the back of their head in some strange form of gustatory concentration.

Things get rolling with a visual test, where Dr. Giuseppe Cicero has complete bars of the chocolate on display at the front of the classroom. Each chocolate is judged on characteristics like opacity, brilliance, color, mottled-ness, and so on.

It’s a relatively easy place to start and ‘relative’ turns out to be a key word. All of the chocolates (they tend to judge about six per week) are lying there and figuring out the difference between chestnut brown, deep brown and black is easier when they are next to one another.

Smelling and tasting, however, can be baffling. It’s also quite fun once you start getting the hang of it. In the beginning, mixed in with all of the other smells in the Dixie cup, who’s to say if something smells more of vanilla or cinnamon? Somewhere during the second tasting, though, I noticed my scores for each of those two tastes become more independent of one another. Other weird correlations crop up: spiciness and overall intensity were often linked, and high intensities of a flavor aren’t necessarily a bad thing.

It’s how it all goes together, in an effort to make perfect chocolate harmony.

And I’m going to keep doing this until I get it right.

This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland.