What’s a Great Chocolate Pairing?

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Summary

• Craft chocolate pairings are a sensory adventure, showcasing the diverse flavours, textures, and tastes chocolate makers and cocoa growers bring to their beans. Savoured best in pairs, these experiences reveal unexpected delights and enhance enjoyment.
• Pairings span whisky, wine, gin, cooking, and coffee, curated by experts like Sunday Brunch’s Simon Rimmer and BBC Radio 4’s Rachel McCormack.
• Principles include delight, synergy of mouthfeel (e.g., tannins enhancing flavor appreciation), and synergy of flavors and aromas (e.g., white chocolate with caviar).
• Bold experiments yield intriguing matches like dark chocolate with cauliflower or strawberries with peas.

Pairing Craft Chocolate

Pairings are awesome. Especially ones with craft chocolate, including white chocolate and caviar! Craft chocolate is all about savouring the distinct flavours, textures, and tastes that chocolate makers and cocoa growers can coax from their beans.

We believe that savouring is best done in pairs. Try pairs of different craft chocolates together or share a couple of bars with friends, families, colleagues, and partners. That way, you can compare them and share impressions.

Pairing craft chocolate with other products is fun. It is also unique. Most importantly, it is also amazing at revealing unexpected delights.

We have arranged a bunch of pairings, tastings and even subscriptions covering whisky, wine, gin, cooking and coffee paired with craft chocolate.

The Principles of Pairing

1. Make it delightful

Of course, a pairing should be greater than the sum of its parts, but above all, it should be full of fun and delight. Try a virtual hosted tasting, and pair your enthusiasm with experts who are both delightful and fun!

Here are just some of the examples of pairing projects we’ve worked on:

Sunday Brunch’s Simon Rimmer, and Steve Tapril from Tappers Gin helped us develop a gin and figgy pudding event.

BBC Radio 4’s Kitchen Cabinet’s Rachel McCormack hosts our whisky tastings. She’s also curated our whisky and chocolate subscription offering.

UK Barista Champion, Fellow of The Royal Academy, and UK Powerlifting Champion, Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood explains how specialty coffee and craft chocolate work so well together in our coffee and chocolate subscription, as well as some craft chocolate in conversation videos.

Ida Weatherall and Rebecca Palmer are wine gurus who hold royal warrants from the Queen to serve her wine. They’ve really excelled at chocolate and wine pairings. Not just red wines but also dessert and orange wines at our Corney & Barrow sessions, and with our various great wine and chocolate gifts.

The tastings are interactive and involved. If you really want, you can lean back and watch. But our virtual tastings are much more like being a celebrity guest on something like Channel 4’s ‘Sunday Brunch’. You get to taste the wine, whisky, gin and chocolate, AND you can share your impressions with no worries about saying the wrong thing! Even if you and a partner, relative, or friend can’t be in the same room, you can still all join in remotely, chatting together over Zoom.

2. Synergy of mouthfeel

It’s VERY clear when foods and drinks clash. It’s also very clear when foods and drinks work together in harmony. They create a synergy. Thanks to Simon, Steve, Rachel, Maxwell, Ida and Rebecca, we’ve built some great experiences that showcase what works and why.

If you’ve been to one of our craft chocolate tastings already, you’ll know that savouring chocolate is about going on a journey of different textures, tastes, and flavours. And the same is true of pairing craft chocolate with whisky, wine, coffee and anything else.

The first synergy you need is around mouthfeel and texture. For example; red wine, coffee and chocolate all contain tannins. Tannins are chemicals that create astringency; the puckering and drying sensation in one’s mouth. The great thing about pairing products with tannins, is it helps your brain acknowledge, and then ignore this puckering sensation. This enables you to appreciate the flavours and not be distracted by the dryness in your mouth. Trust us – it works. Or even better, let us show you at our ‘taste and flavour’ deep dive sessions.

3. Synergy of flavours and aromas

And then once you’ve matched mouthfeel and textures, you can move on to pairing flavours and tastes.

In the early 2000s, Heston Blumenthal (founder and chef of The Fat Duck) was experimenting with salty ingredients and chocolate. He discovered that caviar and white chocolate made a perfect match. Intrigued by this, he partnered with Firmenich, a US-based flavour company, to test the hypothesis that “different foods will combine well together when they share major flavor components“. Armed with the successful results of this study, they founded The Flanders Taste Foundation and a symposium, ‘The Flemish Primitives’, dedicated to promoting the new approach they called ‘Foodpairing’. Foodpairing works by “analysing the aromas and flavour volatiles in foods using the likes of gas chromatography and mass spectrometers and then identifying similarities“.

Sounds pretty obvious. But because this approach deliberately ignored historical and cultural biases, it has turned up some intriguing new pairings. For example, white chocolate and caviar, endives in a dessert, dark chocolate with cauliflower, or strawberries and peas.

We’ve been similarly bold in our approach. But sadly we don’t have access to gas chromatography and mass spectrometers. Instead, we’ve done A LOT of testing. And A LOT of trial and error!

Cocoa Runners and Chocolate Pairing

This is really where we at Cocoa Runners appreciate the expertise, and harder heads, of Rachel, Ida, Rebecca, Steve and Maxwell. As Rachel likes to remind people, after 15+ samples of whisky; it’s hard to know which way is up! Similarly, it can be difficult deciphering notes after a couple of dozen wine samples, but Ida and Bex are just warming up. And multiple coffee cuppings can really wire you up!

Some pairings we know work well out of the box. For example, the winey and vegetal characteristics of many Ecuadorian dark chocolates work great with red wines like Carmenere and cabernet franc. And most lightly roasted coffees with a fruity profile will go well with a Madagascan craft chocolate bar.

Then there are other pairings which are at another level. They really, really work. Thanks to Rachel, Ida, Rebecca, Steve, Simon and Maxwell, we think we’ve hit some magic.

Maxwell has dug deep to pair various beans and roasts in his coffees with different interpretations of various cocoa beans from Fresco, Naive, and more. And Maxwell uses these roasts, beans and fermentations to explain how these two beans have so much in common.

Simon’s cooking is always magnificent… and even more amazing when he has ingredients like Tappers Gin and Original Beans’ cooking chocolate to show us how to create a truly decadent figgy pudding.