The best thing about this is that apart from training your taste buds to find nuances of chocolate in a cigar, you get to eat a lot of chocolate 🙂 You can do it while watching TV or just sitting and scrolling on your phone.
Chocolate, dark chocolate and milk chocolate are quite often used in descriptions of taste in a cigar. It’s not that they’ve added essences or thrown in a piece of chocolate. The nuance is there thanks to the tobacco. The chocolate flavor is there thanks to the type of tobacco, the fermentation, how the tobacco has been stored. Some manufacturers ferment the tobacco in extra a period of time in for example, rum or whiskey barrels to give the tobacco more character of different kinds. If you eat a chocolate that has a cacao content of 85 – 90%, a bitter taste will more or less emerge. In cigars taste of Dark chocolate often also often comes in combination with some kind of coffee notes. We won’t go deep into why flavores come in this post, let’s concentrate on how to train your taste sense to find them more easily.
Let’s begin.
1. Cacao content.
When you want to develop your sense of taste for different shades of chocolate, you should start with the chocolate that has the highest cacao content. If we take milk chocolate as an example, it contains a lot of by-products such as milk and extra sugar that leaves a little residue over the taste buds that takes some time to rinse off. It stops you from feeling the full flavor of other chocolates. The higher the cacao content, the easier it is to rinse away from the taste buds with water.
2. Smell
The sense of smell plays a big role in how you experience flavors, maybe not the biggest part when tasting chocolate, but it will help you bring out the flavors in a better way. Smell the chocolate a little and try to find nuances. When you have drawn a little scent into your nose, hold a little and blow out through your mouth. A bit like retrohaling a cigar but the opposite. Is there any bitterness, sweetness, fruityness? some scents are reminiscent of the scent that can come from cigars. Often a sweet bitter scent that balances each other.
3. Taste
I prefer to have the chocolate at room temperature for the reason that it melts faster in the mouth. If it is too cold, the mouth will also concentrate on the cold, which I usually feel takes away part of the taste. Break off a small piece and let it melt in your mouth. It is important to let it get on the whole tongue so that all parts of the taste buds can feel it. What did you feel? slight bitterness, Fruitiness, sweetness?
If at the same time you exhale through the nose as in retrohaling with a cigar, you use all the senses of taste and can find more flavors and enhance them.
If you repeat it a few times a monthfor 2-3 months your brain will learn to recognize the flavors more easily. For example, when you are out and smell a scent, certain scents make us think of different memories. In the same way the brain will work, it will be taught to recognize flavors and aromas its learnd earlyer and look for them in a cigar.
At the end its about the memory, the way its taught and how it remebers the tasts.
Dark chocolate is also excellent for pairing cigars with 🙂 Try taking a small bite between puffs.
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