Whiskey and chocolate make excellent bedfellows. In my experience, when you pair whiskey with chocolate, you’re more likely to create an elevated sensory experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. While pairing wine and chocolate offers an intellectual challenge that puts my sensory capabilities to the test, whiskey is more of a lay-up, resulting in many pairing combinations that are perfectly pleasant, even when they’re not spectacular.
Maybe it’s the complementary flavor profiles that whiskey shares with chocolate – vanilla, caramel, brown sugar, floral, dried brown fruits, to name just a few. I’m not a fan of smoke, so I am admittedly leaving peaty whiskey out of this generalization. Which is a reminder that tasting is in the mouth of the beholder. You may like a pairing, but your tasting partner may not. You may agree with my statements, or you may not. But I encourage you to try pairing all kinds of whiskey (Bourbon, Rye, Scotch) with chocolate.
Let me share a recent experience to get you started.
I had the chance to help create a memorable evening of whiskey and chocolate pairing with three experts at Esquin Wine & Spirits. I was joined by Nathan Kaiser of Seattle’s 2bar Spirits, Lenny Rede of Esquin Wine & Spirits and Nathan Barker of Vinum Importing in leading a group of 25 through a tasting of eight single-origin chocolates and eight whiskies.
Like any good pairing, you have to do your homework first. While I find chocolate much easier to pair with whiskey than with wine, it still takes work to find combinations that make the chocolate and the whiskey better as a pair than as individuals. Lenny, Nathan Barker and I got together in advance to match up the whiskies with the chocolates, and I have to say that it was one of my favorite days on the job. It ranked up there with the cheese and chocolate pairing exercise I did with Alison Leber of Table2Palate.
So how did we go about finding pairings that worked? Nathan Barker brought samples of the whiskies we planned to taste and offered me verbal descriptions of the tasting notes for each whiskey. As he provided descriptions, I pulled out samples of chocolates that might be a good fit based on the flavor profiles, and I lined the chocolates up next to the appropriate whiskey. In some cases the first samples I pulled worked, in other cases we had to try a few different chocolates to find a strong match. Overall it was a much faster process than trying to pair wine and chocolate.
When I conduct chocolate tasting classes I like to taste the highest percent cacao first (i.e., the least sweet chocolate) and then move down the line to the lower percentages (i.e., sweeter chocolates) before finishing with milk and white chocolate. This keeps my palate from becoming covered in sugar at the beginning of the tasting, enabling me to enjoy the more bitter chocolate on a clean palate. One thing I’ve noticed about pairings is that I often need to conduct the chocolate tasting in the opposite direction. This is true for wine pairings, where we’ll start with a dry sparkling white wine, which is almost impossible to pair with dark chocolate, but which works nicely with a sweet white chocolate. It was also true for the whiskey pairing. We started with 2bar Spirits’ Moonshine, a clear, un-aged corn whiskey with a sweetness that reminds me of sake. This one paired nicely with Valrhona Ivoire, a sweet white chocolate.
When we’d finished our test and had chosen a chocolate for each whiskey, I noticed that three of the eight chocolates we chose were made with cacao from Africa. Two of those chocolates were made with cacao from the small, island nation of São Tomé. Normally when I conduct a chocolate tasting I try to pick chocolates from different cacao-growing regions so that tasters get a sense of the terroir associated with each region.
São Tomé has a distinctive, savory flavor profile that I find pairs well with foods that are earthy or smoky. It’s not my favorite chocolate by itself. For me the taste of São Tomé creates a sensory metaphor of eating chocolate while sitting next to a diesel-fueled campfire with bacon burning on a skillet. Earthy, smoky, hammy and diesel are the flavors that predominate. It is probably for this reason that I’ve found it to be one of the easier chocolates to pair with red wine, and, on this night, with smoky whiskies. As you may have surmised, I’m not a fan of smoky foods. I prefer my lox cured not smoked, I don’t like chocolate that’s been smoked and I really don’t like smoky Scotch or whiskey.
Given my dislike of smoky foods, I had trouble enjoying the two smoky whiskies by themselves. By adding the chocolate made with cacao from São Tomé, the pairing was not only bearable, it was quite enjoyable. That, to me, is the best example of a successful pairing. The sum of the parts is better than the parts by themselves.
Here are the pairings from our event in the order in which we tasted them:
