Bean-to-bar chocolate makers strive to retain the inherent flavours of cacao in their final product, through minimal processing. This is what sets them apart, justifies their charging a premium price, and in turn helps them support cacao farmers by paying a higher price per kilogram. This skill — of retaining the subtle flavours of cacao and unlocking them in a chocolate bar — attracts a lot of attention these days.
It is quite easily possible to lose chocolate’s natural flavour, if the ‘art’ of chocolate-making is not adhered to. So what exactly are these flavours? To understand this, we would have to travel back in time. Mexicans stone-ground their cacao beans to make flavourful ( often fruity) drinks at home. On the arrival of a guest, the lady of the house would freshly roast cacao beans on a pan and deshell them before using a metate (that ammi used to make chutney at home). This was slow-ground and flavours like vanilla, pepper, sugar were added. After 15-20 minutes of grinding, the coarse paste would be mixed with water and served. This process would release all the cocoa butter, but retain the natural fruity flavour. The flavour notes could include red fruits, raisins, citrus. It is believed that cacao and chocolate have more (discovered) flavour notes than wine.
These notes have now been grouped together for better understanding and interpretation, in the recently-introduced flavour-profiling map by the International Institute of Chocolate and Cacao Tasting (IICCT). Wrongly borrowing from wine, coffee and academic fields, the chocolate industry has often used wheels or spider diagrams to describe and market flavour profiles. “A traditional flavour wheel used in wine or coffee is only an infographic. You might as well have a list of flavours. The flavour map actually displays the chemical relationships, as we experience them, between flavours,” explains Alex Rast, a scientist at the School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. The map combines an interactive list of flavours, placed next to each other by their chemical similarity. Hence, it is both an evaluation tool and a graphical display.
When you go into further detail, flavours of cinnamon, jasmine, honey etc form a part of the herbal/spicy quadrant of the flavour map, while raspberries, cranberries, lychee, melon etc form part of the fruity quadrant. The vegetal quadrant includes grassy notes and the dark sweet quadrant includes flavour notes like raisin, winey, mollasses etc.
This system has been evolving over several years, with Rast. It is based on research by sensory experts into flavour compounds found in cocoa powder and their aromas. For the chocolate maker, this is an invaluable tool which helps discover more notes in beans from specific origins. It is useful to everyone, from cacao growers to traders, chocolate makers, professional tasters and casual consumers.