The Nose Plugging Technique To Properly Taste Chocolate

For many of us, chocolate is a no-brainer indulgence — it's delicious, end of story. But in reality, chocolate is a whole world of different flavors to explore. You could turn chocolate into a full hobby, searching for different kinds from different regions and sinking into various flavor profiles. The distinctions run so much deeper than dark, milk, or white chocolate. For example, dark chocolate's bitterness and profile change based on the percentage of cocoa butter and cocoa solids to sugars, vanilla, and emulsifiers, while milk chocolate can use milk heated at different temperatures for more caramelized notes.

The same way we make cheese boards to turn snacking into discovering, you can make a chocolate board for dessert. But to really get the most of this experience, there are chocolate-tasting tips to know, and one of the most game-changing ones is to plug your nose when you place a piece in your mouth. This all comes back to the connection between what we taste and what we smell.

This trick is simple: Take a piece of chocolate, put it in your mouth, and don't chew it. You want to let it melt, giving yourself time to pinpoint individual notes. At first, hold your nose. You'll notice that you don't taste much of anything. When you release your nose, you'll start sensing aromas with growing intensity. Plugging your nose is like a tasting reset, centering your attention on what's present in the chocolate.

The reason this works is because we experience flavor through what we smell. There's a difference between taste and flavor: We have a gustatory system of tastebuds that pick up on qualities like sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. Our olfactory system includes receptors in our nose that process aromas, and those aromas combined with what we taste create our perceptions of flavor. If you suddenly can't smell, you won't pick up on more defined aromas; you might simply observe saltiness or sweetness, or even hone in more on texture. 

Plugging your nose turns those aroma receptors off. You'll zero in on how sweet or bitter or acidic that piece of chocolate in your mouth is. When you release your nose, your olfactory system, cleared and refocused, will start picking up on any of the individual notes that chocolate can have — there are entire chocolate flavor maps with herbal and spicy characteristics like cinnamon, jasmine, and geranium; fruity ones like melon and raspberry; vegetal qualities like grass, wood, and olive; and dark sweet notes like wine, raisin, and molasses. All of those are things your tastebuds wouldn't identify, but your sense of smell will. So it's important to practice the nose hold and also control factors that will influence your food perception, like competing smells in the room.