Estelle Tracy’s Post

Is it bitter or astringent? 🍫🤔 During tastings, I often notice people struggling to describe the flavors experienced in chocolate. This is understandable: after all, fine chocolate exposes you to many more flavor notes than grocery store chocolate. As such, it can be tricky to come up with the right terms to describe the novel experience. When I pass this 85% dark chocolate bar by Hogarth, some tasters will refer to it as bitter. However, I find astringent to be more accurate. But when I mention the term, most prople admit they don’t know what it means 🤷🏻♀️ Like sweet and sour, bitter is considered a taste. ☕️You may experience bitterness while drinking a cup of dark roast coffee, chewing the leaves of bolted lettuce, or biting in the edges of burned toast. In a lot of cultures, bitter isn’t associated with deliciousness. 🫖Astringency, on the other hand, isn’t a taste, but a sensation. For instance, the flesh of an unripe fruit is astringent (if you ever bit into a raw quince, you definitely know what astringent is like.) If you’ve steeped a bag of black tea in hot water for a few minutes long or sipped a very tannic red wine, you’ve also experienced astringency. The dark chocolate you’ll sample at my tastings can be intense, but rarely bitter. Is it astringent? Sometimes. So, time you bite into a fine chocolate bar, ask yourself: is it bitter or is it astringent? — 👋🏼 I’m Estelle Tracy and I host fine chocolate tastings, both virtually all over the world and IRL in the Philadelphia area. 📧 Email me at estelle@37chocolates.com to book a virtual chocolate tasting for your team. 🍫 Follow me for insights on #chocolate, #business and my #37chocolatesjourney.