What It's Like to Be a Professional Chocolate Taster

What's it like to be a professional chocolate tester? Pretty darn sweet.
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Alex Lau

Hand Georg Bernardini, a professional chocolate taster and tester, a bar of Hershey's milk chocolate and he'll unwrap it, smell it, examine the surface and texture, and then bring it to his ears to listen to it break. Finally, he takes a bite, letting the chocolate melt almost completely before he chews, deliberately. His review for the milk chocolate is unrestrained: "Extremely rancid—cheesy...Inedible." Then on to the Cookies 'n' Creme: "Oh dear, oh dear, the ingredients list reads like the list of protagonists of a chamber of horrors...I don't like it." The only explanation for why people in the U.S. must like it "is that there were no alternatives," he guesses.

Bernadini consumed 70 pounds of chocolate—4,200 chocolates from 70 different countries—a year this way. He evaluated everything from flavor, taste, appearance, melt, ingredients, and quality to determine which chocolates are really the best in the world. And he put it in his new, ultimate chocolate guide, Chocolate: The Reference Standard, now available in English. What's it like to be Bernadini? Sometimes a total nightmare, and other times super sweet.

The chocolate tester himself. Photo: Courtesy of Georg Bernardini/Muchomas Chocolate

Courtesy of Georg Bernardini / Muchomas Chocolate
Life Is a Bar of Chocolate

Bernardini worked as a patissier for a few years in commercial kitchens and at Michelin-starred restaurants in France and co-founded German chocolate company Confiserie Coppeneur et Compagnon. But it wasn't until he sold his shares in 2010 that he realized no one had written the definitive guide to chocolate: from the best of the best (Fruition—but more on that later) to the ones you should avoid at all costs (Cadbury—don't even get him started). So began an epic quest to write his book, but first, he had to taste about 6,000 chocolate products from 550 companies and 70 different countries.

Melting it all down. Photo: Alex Lau

Alex Lau
What He Looks For

The most important thing is that all of the ingredients are natural. He has a rating system with 100 points, and 30 are set aside for ingredients. If, for example, a chocolate bar has artificial flavoring, it automatically gets zero points. "If you can only use artificial fruit flavoring, you shouldn't make that chocolate at all," he says.

After ingredients, it's all about harmony. Per Bernardini, an "unharmonic" chocolate might be grainy and sour, or have a price or packaging that doesn't accurately represent the quality. "It should be a very nice voyage in the road of chocolate," he muses. It wasn't fun to taste an overwhelmingly sour fancy French chocolate with ugly packaging that still cost a whopping 60 euro [$65] for a bar. But the absolute worst was an Icelandic chocolate that was smoky to the point of disgusting: "I tasted the small piece of the chocolate, and I could not swallow it, because it was like my mouth was full of ham."

The Best vs. The "Inedible"

When he lands on a perfect chocolate (it's rare, but it does happen), he stops to savor it, knowing that any chocolate he has afterward probably won't measure up. Some favorites include Japanese-made Es Koyama, Nobile Cioccolato in Switzerland, and British-based Pump Street Bakery.

And what about the war between Hershey's and Cadbury? Bernardini dismisses both. "Very few are even edible," he says. On Cadbury's classic dark chocolate: "It is not possible to deal with this chocolate seriously...Surprising that something like this finds buyers." He kept Cadbury critique short, because "It would be a pure waste of time to write more about this."

How It Affects His Diet

In general, he schedules one tasting for the morning and another for the afternoon. Though it doesn't happen often, sometimes he takes breaks, for hours or days. Those are necessary to slow his expanding waistline. "When you eat so much sugar, you get very hungry. My weight went up 10 kilos [over 20 lbs]," he remembers.

Chocolate truffles in the making. Photo: Alex Lau

Alex Lau
The United States of Chocolate

Where can Bernardini find that elusive perfect chocolate? On U.S. soil, it turns out. He loves Fruition based out of Shokan, New York, as well as Massachusetts-based Rogue Chocolatier and Missouri-based Patric Chocolate. Domori in Italy and the variety of assorted bonbons ranks high on his list, too.

Bernardini thinks the U.S. might be the world's most exciting place in the world for chocolate right now. Countries like France have long-established chocolate-making styles that haven't changed in the last 30 to 50 years. Americans, on the other hand, have a blank slate to create new things. According to Bernardini, "The United States has crazy ideas. Fruition makes a chocolate bar with brown butter. I'm missing this in Europe."

Of his top 25 picks, six are American brands—though his friends in Europe don't believe him when he says there are more (and better) bean-to-bar producers in the U.S. He's okay with that, especially because he's putting chocolate tasting on the back burner for a bit. Instead, he's gone back to chocolate-making, where he can eat the chocolate he produces. Because it's still unbelievably cool to spend your whole life around chocolate—and Bernardini doesn't forget that (or take it for granted) for a minute.

Now that you're craving chocolate, how about some silky ganache?