Getting into chocolate: a first year

Buy two bars from one maker, same percentage, different origins — Madagascar and Ecuador at 70% is the clearest pair available. Taste them at room temperature, one after the other.

That single exercise does more than any amount of reading. Most people are surprised by how different two bars of the same percentage can be, and that surprise is the beginning of everything else.

Learn what the percentage is and is not. Learn the difference between bitterness and astringency, and between acidity and sourness. Learn to read an ingredients list.

These four things account for most of the confusion people carry, and each takes ten minutes. After them, chocolate writing stops being opaque.

Run flights that vary one thing. Percentage from one maker. Makers at one origin. Milk styles. Each teaches a different lesson and each is cheap.

Keep notes, however crude. Five words a bar. After twenty bars you will have discovered preferences you did not know you had, and you will start buying much more accurately.

Buying one very expensive bar and eating it alone, which teaches nothing. Buying at 85% or above before knowing whether you like the style. Storing bars in the fridge. Tasting cold. Tasting six things at once.

And buying craft chocolate for baking, where the recipe will erase everything you paid for. Good supermarket chocolate is the right choice there and always will be.

Once the tasting side is established, making something is the fastest way to understand the production side. Tempering by seeding needs only a thermometer and teaches what all the crystal talk is actually about.

A ganache teaches ratios. A hot chocolate teaches what fat does. None of it requires equipment beyond a bowl and a probe thermometer.