Chocolate Tasting Session – Amul Single Origin Series
When Amul launched their Single Origin Series, we decided it would be a great idea to do a chocolate tasting session. The main challenge was in procuring the complete collection. Not all stores had them, and if they did, the stocks would run out before we could get there. With a lot of scavenging for the right stores we picked up a few, but still couldn’t get everything. Annam online came to the rescue. They were the only ones with the entire collection in stock and we managed to get the entire range (shown below). And we were ready to roll…
The Context
– single origin collection mapped
– map of the cacao bean varieties (from my blog )
The Prep (before the session)
It was decided we would do a blind tasting session, with the participants not knowing the chocolate origin.
We created a unified flavor profile chart (adapted from Amul’s packaging) that each participant had to fill in for every chocolate sample. The one from Amul used different parameters for each variety which was not the best for comparison in a study of this nature. So, we consolidated and created a chart that would work for all varieties. We also asked the participants to guess the country of origin and add in additional tasting notes that weren’t part of the flavor profile chart.
Components of the consolidated flavor profile chart:
- creaminess
- nuts
- spices
- citrus/berries
- caramel
- sweetness
- acidity
- bitterness
The Setup
A total of 8 varieties – Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Madagascar + Amul Dark. We included Amul Dark to see if participants can pick up any unique flavor profile from it.
Chocolates were placed in numbered containers, the legend was known only to the setup team.
Brown bread and soda were our palate cleansers, along with plain water at room temperature.
– Note: the chocolate bars (wrappers) were decorative only, they didn’t match the order in which the samples were placed.
The Session
We started the session with a 15 min presentation on the history of chocolate, the varieties and the chocolate making process based on my ‘research’- All you wanted to know about cocoa and chocolate
We had a total of 10 participants. The tasting session was for 1.5 hours and involved each participant tasting a variety and then noting the flavor profile.
Enthusiastic participants started tasting, cleansing palates and tasting again. At around the sixth chocolate, we could see that the palates refused to co-operate and participants had a tough time spotting the subtle notes. In their defense though, the chocolates weren’t that refined for the subtle flavors to come through. We could taste the key flavor profile but not all the notes. For example we could taste the fruity notes of the South American varieties and the pronounced chocolatey notes of the African varieties. Nevertheless, we chugged along and tasted and noted the profiles of each of the 8 varieties.
It was a great session overall with enthusiastic participants displaying the glee of a bunch of kids.
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After analyzing the notes, we came up with the cumulative ‘perceived flavor profile’ for each of the variety.
Top notes in each of the variant:
S01: Peru – spices, citrus/berries, caramel
S02: Ivory Coast – acidity, bitterness, spicy
S03: Ecuador – acidity,sweetness,caramel
S04: Tanzania – sweetness,caramel,
S05: Columbia – nuts, citrus/berries,acidity
S06: 55% Dark – nuts,sweetness, acidity
S07: Venezuela – bitterness, citrus/berries, caramel
S08: Madagascar – nuts, bitterness, citrus/berries
– cumulative flavor profile chart
Legend:
- creaminess
- nuts
- spices
- citrus/berries
- caramel
- sweetness
- acidity
- bitterness
For future tasting sessions
Keep the chocolate variants to less than 5 for a single session of less than 2 hours as it gets tough on the palate to identify individual flavor notes.
Use premium chocolates with higher percentage of cocoa like 75% or more. We used 55% and the sweetness masked most of the flavor notes.
A big thanks to the team that made this happen
Participants: Abdul, Arthi, Atul, Giri, Joydeep, Mandar, Nikhil, Rejeeb, Srishti, Umesh
Procurement, setup and analysis: Umesh, Abdul and myself