A minor revelation that was ignited by recent forays into the world of coffee, the bean and its roasting and grinding: for obvious reasons, chocolate also tends to be marked in quality by the sensitivity of the roast. Like the coffee bean, chocolate beans are roasted – the commercial stuff in big batch machines, the good stuff in smaller machines and with more control and interpretation of the particular bean’s character.
Commercial coffees are often over-roasted to allow them to maintain a robust “coffee” flavour for longer, but the downside is that they often develop associated bitter, dry and tannic notes as the beans are pushed out of the flavour sweet-spot. The same can be said for chocolate – I recently tasted the range of high-end Felchlin Grand Cru chocolates. Five examples that come from five places of origin, each roasted and conched in order to express its personality. Each piece did have remarkably different flavours, subtle to be sure, but distinct. None was harsh or dry, not even the 72% Arriba from Ecuador. The next night I tried an Italian dark organic chocolate (70%) that Woolies is selling as a generic and the crucial difference was in the tannic dryness and harshness of the after-palate. It has masses of flavour, but the dominant is certainly this harshness – surely the result of over-roasting.
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