Chocolate is equivalent to currency, right? If not, it sure is a delicacy. It has been discovered that chocolate was first grown in the Amazon Forest, for food, over 5,000 years ago.
As much as people love milk chocolate, there are just as many fans of dark chocolate. Chances are, if you are not a fan of dark chocolate, it is due to the fact that you might be enjoying it, incorrectly.
Abbe of Raaka Chocolate has a few tips on how to enjoy dark chocolate, the correct way.
High to Low
When tasting multiple dark chocolate bars, you want to start the tasting with the highest percentage chocolate(100%) and work your way down to the lowest percentage(50%…anything lower is not really considered dark chocolate!). This is mainly due to sugar content. The higher the percentage, the less sugar(and other added flavors) the chocolate has. The sugar in chocolate will linger in your mouth after eating it, muddling flavors and dulling your senses. The lower percentage the chocolate, the more sugar it has, and therefore the more it will coat your mouth and “numb” your senses.
Melt Away
To really get the full “roller coaster ride” of flavor as I like to tell people, you want to make sure you really let the chocolate melt in your mouth. Let it melt on your tongue! That way you get to fully experience the different tasting notes that happen at the beginning, in the middle, and then at the end of the chocolate. For example, this roller coaster really shines through with our bourbon bar, as the notes of bourbon come in strong at the very end! Drinking/swishing some water in between flavors helps too!
About Raaka
Unroasted Chocolate
More to note on Raaka’s chocolate’s unique flavors: Our chocolate is unroasted, which is uncommon in the chocolate industry. Unroasted meaning we do not roast our cocoa beans before grinding them into chocolate (roasting cocoa beans is the prominent practice in chocolate making). Roasting cocoa beans refines the flavor and brings out the beans “chocolatey-ness”, while leaving them unroasted retains all of the naturally occuring flavors of the cocoa bean, beyond simply “chocolate flavor”–like nutty, earthy, smoky, fruity, etc.
Single Origin Beans
Raaka chocolate bars are single-origin. This means that each bar is only made with beans from one location. We currently source beans from the Dominican Republic, Peru, Tanzania and Uganda. Each region lends to a completely unique flavor profile of the cocoa beans. If we were to combine beans, those flavors would become muddled. We keep our bars single-origin in order to highlight each of these unique bean’s flavor profiles! We also choose our chocolate flavors in a way that complements each specific bean flavor profiles.
To learn more about Raaka click here.
