Bean to Bar: An Artisanal Chocolate Tasting Session

The handouts provided during the session

Dried cocoa beans

You don’t have words like Trinitario, astringency, winnowing, tempering, Dutch processed and heirloom cacao, casually falling on your ears on any normal Sunday. If they are, it is highly likely that you probably are sitting in an artisanal chocolate tasting session, in the backyard of a house in Gokulam, that is now a café, with the 11 am sunlight gently bouncing off its yellow walls.

“Chocolate originated in the Mayan civilisation as a drink, but only entered the world market when it reached Spain”, explains Tejesh Koppera, whose brain child today’s session, Bean to Bar, is. Chocolate, now a bar, furthered through to France and then to Belgium, where experiments and understanding of consumer demand, helped make chocolate a boon to the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries in the form of highly expensive cocoa butter. Of course, history is the starting point of everything good and worth knowing.

Spread out in front of us are detailed handouts– one, explaining the process of the how exactly, a humble, hard to tame, cocoa plant undergoes several days of processing, at varying temperatures, in varying boxes and rooms, to end up as the shiny beacon of pleasure and indulgence; two, a colourful “Coffee Taster’s Flavour Wheel”, with flavours categorised and ranging from sweet to fruity to floral to green/vegetative. We later learn that we use a coffee tasting wheel, because being a relatively new commodity, cocoa research is far from over, for a specialised cocoa flavour profile wheel to be laid out in front of us.

Listening intently, we trace our fingers and pencils over the nine steps of bean to bar chocolate making. There is talk of chemistry and molecules, temperatures and machinery. But not all is lost in theory, some steps are practical– you pick up the beans, understand their texture, smell them, break them open, even eat them at some point and rub it between your palms to feel them release their fat. Having been closely related to the artisanal chocolate industry for almost two years, and an alum of Lavonne Academy of Baking Science and Pastry Arts, Bengaluru, Tejesh knows what he is talking about. Through his experiences, we travel to Mumbai and France, where he apparently witnessed Bolognese being paired with a huge chunk of dark chocolate, and come back to our backyard, to Mysuru’s own artisanal chocolate brand.

Once we have seen the cocoa bean through its roasting and winnowing and grinding and conching and tempering, we move to phase two of the session and finally open neatly packed, foil wrapped, artisanal bars of chocolates Tejesh has handpicked for our tasting. In front of us, now, is a larger sheet with pentagons and simpler flavour wheels- sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.

We start with the darkest option for the day­­– a Mason & Co 85% Intense Dark Chocolate Bar–and then move on to Colocal’s 72% before ending the Single Origin segment with Koko Pods’ 70%. “The tasting begins way before it reaches our tongues”, Tejesh had claimed earlier in the session, neatly helping us understand with a cookie analogy. Here, we first see the chocolate, checking to see if it is lustrous or matte or if it has bloomed, which apparently is the name for the white lines that appear on the bar when exposed to varying temperatures, especially in transit. Then, we smell it, deeply inhaling the notes of cocoa, and finally, we taste it, trying to register all its flavours and chart its changes, as it softly melts on the tongue, repeating the same for all three, cleansing our palettes with water at each interval. We move through the notes, fruity to caramel sweet to woody, almost earthy tones, slowly savouring, both the chocolate and the Sunday slipping away.

We are now in for an adventure, because inclusion bars, with their slightly unconventional flavour pairings come next. We start with what seems to sound the safest– Colocal’s 70% Cocoa Sea Salt. Too sweet and not salty enough is the verdict. We then pick up the Koko Pods’ 70% Cocoa Orange Delight. Wafts of candied orange and a discussion on the addition of orange essence promptly ensues. We end the tasting session with Mason & Co’s 70% Cocoa Raisin and Sesame bar, by far the oddest pairing on today’s table. Surprisingly, not long after our minds have registered the notes of sesame and the sourness of raisin, this bar shoots up on our mental ranking charts, despite Tejesh politely asking us earlier to keep our comparisons aside, for the sake of the art that is chocolate making. “This one is addictive”, he claims reaching for another piece.

Bean to bar. History to mechanics to tasting the niche art of crafted chocolates. The humble after-meal popper, elevated to deliver sub liminality for all those willing to partake in its journey and appreciate its complexities. It is not every day you get to taste chocolates on your doorsteps, but when, on a Sunday, you do, deep diving into the world of artisanal chocolates is not a bad way to savour your day, at all, especially when you get to leave with a bar of your choice!

Tejesh Koppera (right) and a session attendee

Attendees of the session