How do we know we’re making good chocolate?
Let’s taste what’s out there
When we discovered craft chocolate in 2019, we were excited to try as many craft chocolate brands available to us. In San Francisco, we were able to get our hands on well known US craft chocolate brands like Dandelion, Patric, Letterpress, Castronovo, Dick Taylor, Raaka and many more at Fog City News and Real Food Company. In Manila, Kultura has a good selection of Philippine made craft chocolate like Auro, Risa and Malagos.
Wanna try some chocolates, anyone?
As we started making our own chocolate, our way of telling if we’re making good chocolate was to compare ours with them - them being the well known brands. We would do blind taste tests among ourselves and anybody willing to try. Although our chocolate fared fairly well side-by-side these other well established brands during these tests, we recognized that it was very much dependent on who was doing the blind tests. Most of these people, including us, are new to craft chocolate and do not have the background and vocabulary to describe what we are tasting except to say that we like one over the other.
Getting certified as a chocolate taster
In early 2021 Chocolate Alliance, the organization that hosts the Northwest Chocolate Festival in Seattle, announced the first Chocolate Sensory Analysis Certificate Program for Professionals. It was a five week online course via Zoom where you do chocolate tasting (the chocolates were sent ahead of time) together with participants from all over the world and you score them using a form specially designed for measuring the quality of chocolate.
The program has provided us a set of tools that we can use to improve the quality of our chocolate and has enabled us to explain with confidence why we think they are good.
Since completing the course Romy has been invited and served as a judge for the 2021 Chocolate Alliance Awards.