But seriously… What IS it about chocolate that we love so much?! And why do we all have such different preferences for different forms and flavors of chocolate? Or if you hate chocolate, what is it that you hate about it so much?
I asked my fiancé a random question while we were in the car the other day: if an alien that didn’t need food and didn’t have a mouth or taste buds came down to earth and wanted you to describe what the experience of taste was like, how would you describe it? We were both perplexed at the difficulty of translating the experience from the chemistry, to the feelings, to the words. I’ve been mulling it over for weeks now, and I still can’t figure it out.
What it has left me with is a more thoughtful approach to everything I’m tasting. We’ve long recognized that smell and taste are the most visceral parts of memory...the “instant trigger” that bypasses all logic circuits or thought processes in our brains. This direct pathway from external to internal makes experiencing flavor quite an intimate process. The more curious and conscious I am in the face of new taste experiences or combinations of flavors, the more I’m able to connect with my memory bank and my lived experiences.
Today, I had the realization that chocolate matches our complexity as human beings one to one. We create chocolate from very basic ingredients grown throughout the globe. The cacao varieties, the soil, their ecosystem, the farming techniques, the climate, the processing machinery and techniques, and much more, all impact the flavor of the cacao itself. Much like wine, all of these factors are so dynamic that two batches of chocolate can never truly be the same.
Then there’s the form factor- how is the cacao being used or presented? What sort of occasion or setting is it being served in and by whom? It can go from being a mere hint of flavoring or a garnish, to the starring role in a mousse or a cake, or to being enjoyed purely on its own. The last major set of variables is the context of who is tasting it, how, and when. Have you eaten in the last three hours? Are you thirsty? Is coffee still lingering on your palate? Are you calm and clear headed? Are you anxious or distracted? Are you just eating for comfort? These are just some of the variables that factor into how you might taste or experience the same chocolate on two different occasions.
I’m discovering the process of asking friends and those around me the classic “so what do you think?” after giving them any sort of chocolate to sample to be incredibly revealing. It tells me more about them than about the composition of whatever chocolate they just ate. Two people can try the same piece of chocolate at the same time and have polar opposite reactions to it. That’s such an exciting element to me as a chocolate maker because it’s a reminder there are no absolutes in chocolate! Better yet, the “shoulds” in chocolate are all totally subjective. That, in a cacao pod, starts to scratch the surface of answering the question that’s been rattling around in my head ever since I was little: what is so incredibly special and captivating about chocolate?