Like with every art form, the making of chocolate involves as much creativity as it does science.

You can’t draw breathtaking scenarios without knowing the fundamental rules of proportions, but you can’t even make it your career if you lack the right dose of originality, vision and inventiveness.

Despite being filled with strict rules based in science, from roasting temperatures to tempering chemistry, the bean-to-bar process still includes some obscure stages that are hard to explain and difficult to understand. They are open to interpretation and influenced by personal experience, bringing some methods to spread like legends from professional to professional without much scientific evidence to support them.

Aging chocolate (which is pretty much waiting for something to change in the chocolate) is part of the mystery.

There are bean-to-bar makers that like to age their chocolate in other ingredients for extra flavors, from leaving the finished chocolate inside spirit barrels to soaking the cacao nibs for weeks in specialty teas. Although a great method to give the chocolate even more complexity, today we are not talking about these cases. What we are considering is chocolate left to age on its own with the belief that its aromatic profile will improve over time.

Craft chocolate makers are completely divided on this topic. There is no in-between: you either believe that time can confer to the chocolate its most flawless, stable and complex tasting profile, or you disregard aging chocolate as a naïve waste of time. But the conflict doesn’t end here! Some professionals believe that chocolate should be consumed as fresh as possible, and what you experience are its most authentic flavors. Others are sure that chocolate should be aged at some point to perform its best aromatic profile.

Aging in the chocolate process can take place at different stages. Chocolate makers can:

Age cacao beans
Age untempered chocolate
Age tempered chocolate
Age chocolate bars

Let’s discuss them all!

AGING CACAO BEANS

Aging cacao beans isn’t very popular among craft chocolate makers.

It seems that the only reason why you would want to wait to use freshly delivered cacao beans is if you got a “bad batch” and needed to get rid of (or at least tone down) unwanted flavors. This happens when the cacao beans aren’t particularly of good quality, and especially if they are underfermented.

Craft chocolate makers choose with care their suppliers, so it’s rare that they will get a bad batch of cacao beans. Aging cacao beans is a practice that belongs more to bigger manufacturers that buy lower quality cacao beans and need to get rid of some very unpleasant volatiles. But if they got a good batch of beans like they expected, makers of fine flavor chocolate will rarely make them age intentionally (unless they want to run some curious experiments).

The only reason why a bag of cacao beans would sit around in the warehouse is to wait its turn to be processed into chocolate, since most chocolate makers process one cacao origin at a time (with some rare occasions for blending). It’s actually worth noticing that the longer the cacao beans lay around in the factory, the higher the risks of contamination, molding and loss of interesting aromatic compounds.

If the cacao beans are in perfect conditions, there is usually no reason for craft chocolate makers to age them.

AGING UNTEMPERED CHOCOLATE

If chocolate makers decide to age their chocolate, this is the stage where they are most likely going to do it.

Fresh chocolate out of the melangeur or the conching machine is molded in big blocks of several pounds each, wrapped tightly in plastic and stored away in a cool and dry place before the process can continue. You will find pictures of chocolate makers showing large blocks of untempered chocolate piled on the shelves of their kitchens left to rest anywhere from a couple of weeks to even up to 6 months, until ready to be tempered and molded into bars. Aging untempered chocolate is believed to:

Correct flaws
Round off the flavor profile

If a chocolate maker doesn’t dispose of production techniques and machines that effectively remove unwanted volatiles and off flavors, she/he might want to give the chocolate some time to get rid of them. In the meantime, the natural cacao aromas will continue to develop, amalgamate and stabilize for a fuller flavor profile.

Although aging untempered chocolate makes sense on paper, some sceptics argue that all the efforts taken during this stage will be nullified when the chocolate is melted again to be tempered.

AGING TEMPERED CHOCOLATE

Other craft makers believe in aging tempered chocolate.

They would temper the chocolate, mold it in big blocks, store it away and use it when they are ready to make bars. The reason why they would want to do this is not to get rid of bad flavors (it might be too late at this stage), but to:

Lock in the best flavors

Thanks to tempering, the cocoa butter inside the chocolate reaches the most desirable crystal structure. However, even after molding, much of the cocoa butter inside the chocolate remains in liquid form. The chocolate looks solid and compact, but part of the cocoa butter inside continues to crystallize. Waiting some weeks before molding the chocolate in its final form will give all the flavors time to get locked in while the cocoa butter crystallizes.

The biggest critique to this method is that it just “won’t do much”. Tempered chocolate is less porous and “tighter” than untempered chocolate, resulting in less probabilities of internal changes. Plus, the chocolate will be re-tempered any way, resetting the clock and nullifying the efforts like in the case of untempered chocolate.

AGING CHOCOLATE BARS

Just like vintage bottles of wine, chocolate bars can change their flavor profile over time (when properly stored).

Consumers can decide to resist temptation and store their (dark) chocolate bars for years to save them for later comparisons. But there are two roads that the chocolate can take: achieve a rounder and more complete flavor profile for the better, or lose its most subtle nuances over time. It’s definitely a risky chance to take.

Craft chocolate makers have other reasons to age their finished chocolate bars before selling them. Here are some of them:

To understand what consumers will experience. Unless they live in proximity to the chocolate factory and can get chocolate fresh out of the molds, most consumers will enjoy chocolate after weeks of storing and travelling between importers, distributors and retailers, together with some additional life on the shelves. Chocolate makers can taste the chocolate fresh off the molds, and then store it for a couple of weeks to compare the past and present flavor profile. This way they can make sure about the ACTUAL flavor profile that consumers are going to experience weeks/months later.

To check how packaging impacts flavor. If there is one disastrous event that can ruin even the most amazing chocolate is packaging that transfers unpleasant aromas of rubber, ink or plastic onto the chocolate over time. Craft chocolate makers can check this effect only if they wait a couple of weeks for the chocolate to stay inside the designated wrapper and then check if any defect has arisen.

To let a mediocre batch get better. No one is infallible, and even the most experienced craft chocolate makers might do something wrong during the process. Letting the fresh chocolate bars sit for some time is the last chance to see if any unpleasant flavors can be toned down while new interesting notes appear.

While some chocolate makers retain their chocolate bars solely for quality checks, others more strongly believe in chocolate aging and will intentionally let their chocolate bars sit around for some time before selling or shipping them. But even then, if great raw materials, machines and skills were involved, there should be no worry for the flavors needing to “get better” over time. Or is it?

SO DOES AGING CHOCOLATE WORK?

Aging chocolate definitely works when there is something unsatisfying about the chocolate to adjust, refine or soften. Chocolate that was made with flawless cacao beans, great machines and a decade of bean-to-bar experience, might not need to be aged. However, more than a crucial step or a waste of time, aging chocolate could be considered a personal touch that the chocolate artisan decides to give to her/his bean-to-bar process.

Aged or not, the most important thing is that the chocolate results in a delicate, complex and unforgettable sensorial experience for everybody to enjoy. If some extra time could make the chocolate taste better, would you be willing to wait?

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