5 Ways to Tell if Chocolate is Good Quality

5 Ways to Tell if chocolate is good quality; a beginner’s guide to getting chocolate that you and your wallet will enjoy.

In the past, I have joked that people who don’t enjoy chocolate can’t be trusted.

Human brains, or at least most of them, can’t help but take pleasure when chocolate melts on the tongue. The texture, the flavour. The whole experience is luxurious.

However, most people in the UK, and even more in the USA, are still scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to chocolate. Many of us are paying for poor quality and excess ingredients designed to keep us hooked. While there is admittedly a lot of snobbery when it comes to chocolate (don’t get me wrong I still enjoy a bag of Mini Eggs) it’s not without good reason.

Chocolate, like wine or coffee, is a luxury item. Yet somehow we have all come to demand it as if it grows in the fields outside our cities.

Cacao trees, which supply the base ingredients for our beloved chocolate, can only grow in certain parts of our planet. The trees’ fruit is grown, harvested, processed and shipped thousands of miles. This is all before the roasting, grinding, conching, tempering and moulding of chocolate is even thought about. Enormous distances travelled, days’ worth of human labour, years of developed skill. All that for us to complain about a bar of the finished product to cost more than 70p.

It’s a product we expect to be readily available at an incredibly cheap price. This considered, there are still always a handful who complain about the fact a brand’s bar “is not the same as it used to be” or that “it’s smaller than it used to be.” I have been this person.

Not all good quality chocolate is prohibitively expensive or hard to find, especially in the age of the internet. Similarly, not all expensive chocolate is good quality.

Decent chocolate can actually be easy to spot when you know some things to look out for. In this post I want to tell you 5 ways to tell if chocolate is good quality, using your own evolution-given senses.

1. Sight

Size matters. Sometimes.