Most of
us know how to eat chocolate, but last week a lucky group of ACIAR project people were taught how to taste chocolate like the experts
do. They worked hard and tasted a dozen offerings from several brands.
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| Tasting time at TADEP |
The chocolate tasting took place in Cairns at the annual meeting of
TADEP - ACIAR’s Transformative Agriculture and Enterprise Development
program, which is co-funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Five
of our projects in Papua New Guinea make up the TADEP program, two of which deal with
cocoa.
The 12
chocolates for the tasting were assembled by Grant Vinning from ACIAR’s Bougainville Cocoa project. He sourced chocolate made from local
Papua New Guinea cocoa beans, along with chocolate made from cocoa beans grown
in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. There was even some chocolate made
in Australia from semi-processed chocolate (couverture). Participants tasted all varieties, and also judged the packaging and the
name of each chocolate.
Grant
gave instructions on how to
eat chocolate for a tasting - basically, chew it, and keep on chewing it until
it dissolves in your mouth. The
chocolate was scored on four taste criteria: flavour, smoothness, persistence,
and sharpness.
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| Careful deliberations on the chocolate qualities |
Taste is often seen as being purely subjective or personal. Yet this exercise showed that taste can be
broken down into a series of objective criteria. The results of our survey of 12 chocolates showed that when using criteria
such as ‘sharpness’ and ‘persistence’, it is possible to make consistent assessments.
On the
day there was agreement that the Nunu Black Opal 80% chocolate made by Jasper + Myrtle of Canberra was outstanding. This chocolate is made
from beans grown by Martin and Kathleen Linnix of Bougainville. And it seems the professional tasters agree:
this same chocolate won a gold medal last week at the Academy of Chocolate world championships
in London. Jasper + Myrtle first connected with their Bougainville bean
growers at the Bougainville
Chocolate Festival.
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| Using beans from a single grower creates a unique chocolate |
Professor David Guest, leader of the ACIAR
Bougainville Cocoa Project, said that the judges for the chocolate competition
at this year’s Chocolate Festival will be using a series of objective criteria to
establish the Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal winners. He noted that four of last year’s Gold Medal winners
have gone on to do business with chocolate makers in Australia. The next Bougainville
Chocolate Festival will be held in September 2017.
Find out more:
ACIAR project - Developing the cocoa value chain in Bougainville
Fact sheet
Chocolate launch press release
ACIAR blog March 2017
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