Sweet spot: Experts reveal what makes a chocolate bar great
Craft chocolate isn’t just chocolatey or creamy. It can be fruity, spicy and complex too. Forget wine terms. Professional tasters are building a new vocabulary
We know how to describe a good wine, how to choose the right coffee beans, and which artisanal cheese to pick for a charcuterie board. We drop terms such as ‘robust’, ‘nutty’, and ‘sharp’ when we’re describing certain flavour qualities. “And yet, when it comes to craft chocolate, there’s no standard terminology,” says L Nitin Chordia, 46, chocolate taster and founder of Kocoatrait, a bean-to-bar chocolate brand and Cocoashala, a chocolate-making institute. “That’s because the community of chocolate tasters, both in India and globally, is still small.”
But as India’s obsession with good chocolate grows, we’re going to need a wider vocabulary to make sense of it all. See how those who grow cacao, make chocolate, and taste the delicious final product tread through the field, so our pickings are easier.
Sound bite
There’s no right or wrong way to eat chocolate. But to judge a good cocoa bar, the usual unwrap-and-bite method is not enough, says Chordia. He breaks off a square, smells it, and rolls the piece around on his tongue to note which flavour hits him first. “The cocoa butter in chocolate is what holds all the flavour,” he says. So, when it melts in your mouth, that’s when its flavours really pop. “What I’m doing is paying attention to its shine and gloss, what kind of aroma it gives off, and how long the taste lingers on the tongue,” he says.
Chordia consults for chocolate brands and chocolatiers, who send their samples across to him for tasting. He estimates that he’s tasted over 3,000 types of chocolate since he became a taster in 2015. “At any point, there are over 100 types of chocolate from all over the world at our Chennai institute,” he says. He reserves two days in a week to evaluate new products, most of which have not yet hit the market, and finds that his senses are the sharpest one hour after brushing in the morning, or after eating a spicy meal.
Manufacturing shortcuts are easy to spot, if you know where to look. A bar that’s too dark may indicate that the beans were over-roasted. If it smells like vanilla, the brand has probably swapped expensive cocoa butter for cheaper vegetable oils, or is masking the presence of low-quality beans. “Industrial chocolate makers tend to use vanilla, because we associate the smell and taste of vanilla with a high-quality product.”
Most people associate creaminess with quality. That myth has got to die, says Vikas Temani, 45, business head at the Indian chocolate brand, Paul & Mike. “We tend to confuse texture and flavour,” he says. “But with good chocolate, what really matters is what other floral, spicy, or fruity notes you’re tasting in it, aside from the way it melts in your mouth.” Temani’s best test is a simple one. “A chocolate maker has succeeded if you want to eat the whole bar, even when you don’t have a sugar craving.”
If you’re confused, break down the label, says Chaitanya Muppala, 34, founder of Manam Chocolate. Craft chocolate shouldn’t have more than four or five ingredients. “Terms such as single-origin Indian bean mean nothing.” But the amount of cocoa in a bar matter. Look for cocoa fats, not the cheaper cocoa solids.
Spill the beans
India’s craft chocolate revolution has only just begun. That means, every new brand is vying for attention, with dramatic origin stories and outlandish claims about how the beans get their flavour. An ad might claim that growing a cacao crop next to an orange or jackfruit tree imparts a new level of flavour to the beans. That’s a lie. “The genetic variety of the cacao bean is the only thing that determines flavour,” says Chordia. And that flavour depends on how beans are fermented and roasted.
Here’s where it gets geeky. Kocoatrait looks for 82 variables between the harvesting and tempering process. These include the microbes in the bean and the enzymatic reactions that develop during fermenting. “Combine that with the fact that more than 600 flavour compounds have been identified in cacao, and you understand why it’s so hard to simplify flavour profiles.”
It also impossible to attribute a single flavour to a bean-growing region, because each estate there might grow beans of different flavours, says Dhayvat Udeshi, 36, founder of Baker’s Artisanal Recipes, a chocolate brand. The better the bean, the more flavours it might impart to the chocolate. “Customers can’t pinpoint the flavour, but they tell us that it reminded us of mangoes, or of walking through an orchard.”
Bringing out this complexity is the toughest part of the job. The International Institute of Chocolate and Cacao Tasting trains students to identify delicate tastes and aromas and articulate them. Founder Martin Christy’s flavour chart includes a set of broad quadrants: Herbal spicy, fruity, dark, vegetal, with a central touchpoint: Chocolatey. But it’s one firm’s hack, not an industry-wide guide. “This means someone could describe a chocolate in a certain way, and the consumer wouldn’t know if they were being honest or not,” says Udeshi.
Lingering notes
Chocolate tasting isn’t about “sitting in a room with a white lab coat and eating bars all day”, says Temani. Tasters typically consume no more than a few squares at a time, a few times a week. They also taste the ghastly bits: Fermented pulp, cacao nibs, cocoa mass. “We do consume a lot more chocolate than the average person, but we restrain ourselves to one square per bar,” says Chordia. Like confectioners, they watch their weight and acidity levels and prepare for occasional migraines from the sugar rush. “A bad chocolate, which I would give a Fail grade, would firstly have no chocolate notes, because it is too acidic, astringent and bitter,” Chordia says. “I’ve had chocolate that tastes like pee, poop, cheese, ham and vomit!”
From HT Brunch, September 20, 2025
Follow us on www.instagram.com/htbrunch
