How to Taste Chocolate Like a Professional
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To taste chocolate well, use small pieces at room temperature, keep plain crackers and warm water between bars, and let each piece melt on your tongue before you chew. Then take every bar through the same six steps: look, snap, smell, melt, flavor and finish.
Most of the setup below comes from professional tasters, mainly the protocol published by Cacao of Excellence, a research program that judges cacao from around the world. The same steps work at a kitchen table with four bars and a few friends.
Set up: what to buy, how many bars, palate cleansers, temperature
A good tasting is mostly decided before the first bar is unwrapped: a small number of bars of one type, at room temperature, with crackers and warm water on the table.
How many bars
Four to six is plenty. The 2023 Cacao of Excellence guide recommends no more than six chocolate samples in a single session and twelve in a day, because senses tire and adapt. Its authors add that many experts find tasting chocolate more tiring than tasting the cocoa mass it’s made from.
A classroom activity from the University of Reading, written by Schollar in 2006, arrives at the same limit from experience: comparing more than six products is hard, and four bars chosen to differ from each other work best.
What to buy
Pick one type and stay in it: all dark, or all milk, or all white. A milk bar next to an 85% dark bar mostly shows you the gap in sugar. Within a type, choose bars that differ in one thing you’re curious about, such as origin, maker or cocoa percentage. If you’re new to the types, types of chocolate explains how dark, milk, white and ruby differ.
Buy enough for two pieces of each bar per person. You’ll want a second go at the ones people argue about.
Temperature
Taste at room temperature, which the Cacao of Excellence guide gives as 20 to 22 °C (68 to 72 °F). It also sets a schedule: chocolate stored somewhere cold comes out an hour before tasting, and frozen samples move to the fridge overnight first. Let a cold bar warm up in its wrapper. Unwrapped, it can collect condensation, which is one way chocolate ends up with sugar bloom, and chocolate bloom explains the rest.
Avoid tasting straight after a meal, which the guide also advises against.
Palate cleansers
Use plain, unsalted water crackers and warm water. Cacao of Excellence recommends crackers made only from flour and water, with no yeast or salt, and water at 40 to 50 °C (104 to 122 °F), unchlorinated and without added salts. Its routine between samples goes like this: rinse with warm water and spit, chew a small piece of cracker with your front teeth (the guide warns crackers stick in your molars), rinse and spit again, rinse a third time and swallow. Then keep your mouth closed for two to three minutes. The guide also lists apple, baby carrots and cucumber as options.
Water on its own does poorly in the research. A 2008 Ohio State thesis by Lucak tested six palate cleansers across seven very different foods, from coffee to sausage, and only table water crackers worked consistently for all seven.
Wine research points the same way. In a 2007 study of red wine by Ross and colleagues, crackers cut the drying feeling of astringency better than water, which came last. None of these studies tested chocolate, so the case for crackers with chocolate is an inference from other foods. A palate cleanser is cheap, so use one.
Other things for the table: a small plate or paper square per bar, a pen, a cup to spit into, and something to write on. Ask your guests about allergies before you buy. The Reading activity flags nuts in particular.
The tasting steps
The order matters less than doing the same steps for every bar. Break off a piece of about 2 to 3 grams, the amount Cacao of Excellence uses per tasting, and keep the pieces the same size across bars. The guide notes that bitterness, acidity and astringency depend on how much chocolate is in your mouth, so an unequal piece can make an unequal bar.
Look
Start with your eyes, before anything gets warm. Good chocolate usually has an even color and a glossy surface. Gloss, like snap, comes largely from tempering, the controlled crystallization of cocoa butter, and what is tempering explains why. A 2021 paper by Chen and colleagues calls proper melting, gloss and snap “hallmarks of good quality chocolate”.
Look for bloom: white or gray streaks, a dull film, or a dusty surface. Bloom is a defect of looks and texture, not of safety. Chocolate bloom explains how to tell the two kinds apart and why they happen. Scuffs and fingerprints are handling marks, so judge the back of the bar too, which nobody has touched.
Snap
Break the piece close to your ear. Well-tempered dark chocolate should be firm and break with a strong, clean snap, unlike under-tempered chocolate, according to a 2025 study by Stobbs and colleagues. Then look at the broken edge. A clean, even break is a good sign. A soft bend or a crumbly edge in a dark bar can point to poor temper. If you want to see where that sound comes from, how to temper chocolate walks through it at home.
That research is about dark chocolate. Milk and white bars have a different recipe, so compare snap only within one type and don’t expect a white bar to crack like an 80% dark.
Smell
Smell before you taste. The Cacao of Excellence routine: hold one of the broken halves near your nose and rub its surface with your fingers to warm it, breathe out to clear your nose, then take several short sniffs. Write down what you notice before you put anything in your mouth.
Smell works in two directions. Sniffing sends aroma in through your nostrils. Once the chocolate is in your mouth, aroma travels up the back of your throat to the same smell receptors, a route called retronasal smell, as Özay and colleagues describe. Much of what we call the “taste” of chocolate, beyond sweet, bitter and sour, arrives that second way.
Researchers agree that smell plays a dominant role in tasting food, Charles Spence writes in a 2015 paper. He also looked at the precise percentages often quoted for how much of taste is really smell, and found the evidence for them is “rarely, if ever, cited”.
The smell of cocoa rests on a few dozen compounds. In a 2006 study of cocoa powder, Frauendorfer and Schieberle found 35 compounds that actually contribute to its smell, then mixed 24 of them into a neutral cocoa base and got the sweet, cocoa-like aroma of the real powder.
Melt (do not chew yet)
Put the second half on your tongue and let it melt. Cacao of Excellence describes pressing the chocolate between tongue and palate, rubbing it gently against the roof of your mouth, then spreading it across your tongue as it softens. Don’t chew it straight away. Chewing isn’t forbidden (the same guide has assessors chew solid cocoa mass a couple of times), but a slow melt gives you time to notice things.
It melts without chewing because well-tempered chocolate sets in a crystal form that melts at roughly 30 to 34.5 °C (86 to 94 °F), just under body temperature, according to the same Stobbs study. Cocoa butter polymorphs has more on the crystal forms.
As it melts, the chocolate turns from a solid into a liquid mixed with saliva, and saliva dissolves the sugar and thins the melt, as a 2017 study by Rodrigues and colleagues describes. This is when mouthfeel shows up. Pay attention to:
- smoothness, or a sandy, gritty feel
- how fast it melts, and whether it melts evenly
- a dry, puckering feeling, called astringency, which Cacao of Excellence compares to raw nut skins or green banana skins
- a waxy or coating film left on your palate
Grit is about particle size, and people differ in how well they feel it. In a 2019 Penn State study by Breen and colleagues, tasters with sharper oral sensitivity picked out the grittier of two dark chocolates far more reliably than the rest, so a friend may feel grit in a bar that seems smooth to you. How chocolate is refined covers the details.
Flavor and how it changes
Flavor isn’t one moment. Cacao of Excellence asks tasters to notice three stretches as the chocolate melts: the first notes, the middle, and what’s left at the end. Some flavors appear and vanish fast or get covered by others; some linger. The order changes from bar to bar.
While it melts, breathe in a little air through your mouth, as if sipping, and breathe out through your nose. That’s the guide’s instruction too, and it pushes aroma along the retronasal route.
Start with the basics: how sweet, how bitter, how sour. Then look for the aromas. A bar might open with roasted cocoa, turn fruity in the middle and fade into something nutty. Write each stage down as it comes. Two or three words per stage are enough.
Finish
The finish is what stays after the chocolate is gone: which flavors remain, how long, and whether they’re pleasant. Cacao of Excellence tells tasters to check the finish and aftertaste and revise their scores if needed.
Long isn’t automatically good. A defect can linger as well, and the guide even tells tasters to repeat the rinse when a sample is “particularly persistent due to some defect or intense attribute”. Judge a finish on two things: how long it lasts and whether it’s clean.
Professionals both spit and swallow. The Cacao of Excellence guide allows spitting the melted chocolate into a cup if needed. A judge for the International Chocolate Awards writes the opposite: unlike wine, chocolate has to be eaten and swallowed, because many of its flavor notes only come out at the full melt. At home with six bars, swallowing is fine. In a long session, spitting keeps you fresher.
Words for what you taste
Most people struggle to name smells, and training helps. In a 2019 study by Morquecho-Campos and colleagues, odor identification improved clearly over eight training sessions, and the gains carried over to new smells.
Experts have a smaller edge than you’d think. A 2016 study of wine and coffee experts by Croijmans and Majid found their advantage in naming flavors was modest, and partly a matter of having learned the words. Novices tended to reach for judgments like “nice”. A word list helps close that gap.
There’s also no single shared vocabulary for chocolate. A 2022 review by Lemarcq and colleagues found the descriptive words varied from study to study. Below is our own short list, written for tasting bars at home. Start at the top and go only as specific as you can honestly go.
Basic tastes. Sweet, bitter, sour (or acidic), and now and then salty if the bar has added salt.
Mouthfeel. Smooth, creamy, silky, gritty, sandy, waxy, sticky, drying (astringent), fast melt, slow melt.
Cocoa and roast. Cocoa, brownie, toast, coffee, burnt sugar, a hint of smoke that the maker intended.
Fresh fruit. Citrus, red berries, cherry, green apple, banana, tropical fruit.
Cooked and dried fruit. Raisin, prune, fig, jam, baked apple.
Nuts. Hazelnut, almond, peanut, walnut skin.
Sweet and caramel. Caramel, honey, molasses, brown sugar, vanilla.
Dairy (mostly milk and white chocolate). Fresh cream, butter, cooked milk, malt, yogurt-like tang.
Flowers and herbs. Blossom, perfume, fresh-cut grass, mint, green leaves.
Spice and wood. Cinnamon, pepper, licorice, tobacco, cedar, earth after rain.
Off-flavors. Musty, moldy, harsh smoke, cardboard, stale or rancid fat, soapy, and anything that reminds you of a damp basement. These are faults, not notes, and in a review they cap a bar’s flavor score under the Panda Score.
If you want to go further, two published wheels can help. The Cacao of Excellence Flavour Wheel and Glossary of Terms, built from the program’s 12 years of judging cacao samples, groups core attributes, complementary aromas and off-flavors for dark chocolate and cocoa mass. It’s published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license, so we link to the guide rather than reproduce it.
The other is a consumer flavor wheel from 2018. Five focus groups of 48 consumers tasted white, milk and dark chocolates, and De Pelsmaeker and colleagues organized what they said into 61 descriptors in three tiers. It’s the closest to how ordinary tasters talk.
Why two tasters disagree about the same bar
Two people tasting the same bar differ in their senses, and tasting is a skill that improves with practice.
Genes affect how bitter some compounds taste: variants of one bitter taste receptor gene explain much of why some people find the test compound PTC intensely bitter and others barely notice it, as Kim and colleagues showed in 2003.
Whether that changes chocolate is less clear. In a 2001 study of 54 women by Ly and Drewnowski, people who found the related compound PROP bitter did rate caffeine as more bitter, yet they didn’t differ from non-tasters in how they perceived chocolate. It’s one small study, but it’s a good reason not to blame genes when a friend calls your favorite bar too bitter.
Texture sensitivity varies too, as the grit study above showed. And in a 2019 study by Acierno and colleagues that measured the aroma reaching ten people’s noses as they ate ten chocolates, differences between the people were larger than differences between the cocoa beans.
Then there’s practice. Smell naming improves with training, as the Morquecho-Campos study found, and professional panels train and calibrate before they judge: Cacao of Excellence has assessors taste known reference samples before each session. At home, the closest thing is tasting the same bar again a week later and seeing whether you find the same notes.
Host your own tasting
Plan on about an hour. The Reading classroom activity takes about 60 minutes.
Hide the brands. Unwrap the bars before anyone arrives, put each on a plate and label it with a random three-digit code, which the Reading activity recommends to avoid any bias toward “number 1”. Cacao of Excellence codes its samples the same way. The Reading authors also warn that a bar’s shape can give the brand away, so break the pieces before serving if your guests know their chocolate.
Serving order has the least evidence behind it. Sensory science handles it differently: tasting one sample changes how you perceive the next, so formal panels balance the serving order across tasters, as MacFie and colleagues set out in 1989. That carry-over is real. In red wine, astringency builds with each repeated sip, the Ross study found.
So within one type of chocolate, go from the mildest bar to the most intense, and strong bitterness and drying won’t spill into the next sample. If you hold a second round, change the order and see whether anyone’s notes move.
A few house rules make the evening work:
- Everyone tastes each bar and writes notes in silence before anyone speaks. The first person to say “cherry” will otherwise find cherry in everybody’s mouth.
- Cracker and warm water between every bar.
- Talk, compare, argue.
- Reveal the brands at the very end, then taste your favorite again knowing what it is.
How we score chocolate
Chocolate reviews on this site carry a Panda Score: one number out of 10, with one decimal, built from five criteria that follow the steps above. Flavor carries 35% of the weight, texture and melt 20%, and appearance and snap, aroma and finish 15% each. An off-flavor such as mold caps a taster’s Flavor score at 4.
At least two tasters score each bar blind, and no advertiser can affect a score. The Panda Score: how we rate chocolate sets out the scale, the rounding, a worked example and the full tasting protocol.
Where to go next
Once you can taste the difference between two bars, the next question is where that difference comes from. Cocoa origins compared looks at Ghana, Ecuador and Madagascar, what the research says about each, and how much a label can promise. Pick three bars of different origins from one maker and run them through the steps above.
For the words used here and on the wrapper, the chocolate glossary has short definitions, from conching to cocoa butter.
Sources and open questions
We found no study that measures how much cold dulls chocolate flavor, so no number is given for it here.
We found no study or standard behind the common advice to taste milk before dark, or low percentage before high.
The six-bar limit comes from the experience of professional panels and teachers. Nobody has measured a fatigue threshold for chocolate.
The Ohio State thesis was later published as Lucak and Delwiche (2009). Colonna and colleagues (2004) also found crackers better than water for red wine, and a study of spirits by Seo and colleagues (2015) found water among the least effective cleansers.
We read only the abstracts or summaries of the palate cleanser studies and thesis, Spence (2015), De Pelsmaeker et al. (2018) and Ly and Drewnowski (2001).