Forget everything you thought you knew.
A professional chocolate taster says we’ve been eating Easter eggs wrong.
If you love nothing more than crunching down on chocolate Easter egg shells, you may want to reconsider your technique.
Mary Luz Mejia explains that it’s all about sucking our chocolate, rather than chewing it, as this helps us taste it better.
The 53-year-old, from Toronto, Canada, said: ‘My best advice for tasting would be to “melt, don’t munch”.
‘Or, as we say in Canada “suck, don’t chew”. Chomping on a bar of chocolate for that quick fix will never satisfy you as much as savouring it.’
Mary Luz Mejia has been a chocolate taster for four years, after pursuing it as a side hustle alongside journalism.
And she knows her stuff, too.
In 2019, she began the three-year course in chocolate tasting, learning to analyse the taste of it, as well as chocolate history and the differences between commercial and cacao bars.
As a result, she also says we should ditch cheap Easter eggs in favour of cacao alternatives – even if they cost a little more.
Mary continued: ‘There’s a huge difference between cacao and a “two-buck-and-chuck” bar.
‘You need to look right at the ingredients. In a good chocolate bar, the only three ingredients should be sugar, cacao and cacao butter.
‘A bad chocolate bar will be crammed with sugar and tons of other flavourings and preservatives.
‘You might be paying £7 for an egg instead of £3 – but the quality is so much better.’
Mary claims this difference in taste all comes down to the chocolate-making process.
She added: ‘Bean-to-bar chocolate is made by dry-fermenting the cacao bean and making sure it’s good-quality.
‘With commercial chocolate – there isn’t a dry-fermentation process, and there’s a high chance the cacao bean isn’t of high quality.
‘It could be mouldy, or moths might’ve got to it.’
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