Now, I have asked many many people whether they like chocolate-covered strawberries. Far and away the most common response was "not really." The few people who liked them, when questioned further, said they liked the sweetness of the strawberry and didn't pay much attention to the strawberry, or they ate the chocolate first and then the strawberry, so they liked them individually and never wanted to eat them in the same bite.
Bottom line: for most people, chocolate-covered strawberries are pretty to look at but no thrill to eat.
You could argue, and rightly so, that the strawberries used in these "treats" are humongous bulbous flavorless mistakes of human interference with nature, and that you wouldn't expect them to taste good with anything. But when I was younger (a good while back, I'm afraid) the strawberries weren't so monstrous, and by themselves tasted wonderfully sweet and strawberry-like. But their flavor was lost when dipped in chocolate.
Enrobing the strawberry with white chocolate
may be better for getting the strawberry flavor,
if not the chocolate...
What's going on here?
First of all, I looked for Furaneol® in strawberries and chocolate in my flavor chemistry classic, Henk Maarse's Volatile Compounds in Foods and Beverages (Marcel Dekker, 1991).**
Strawberries have plenty of Furaneol®—at low concentrations it gives strawberries part of their classic flavor—it's even called "strawberry furanone"—but it's unstable and doesn't last over time.*** Another more stable compound, mesifurane, is probably the compound that gives the most strawberry-like flavor in nature. (I say "in nature" because there are a lot of artificial strawberry flavorings.) Parenthetically, strawberry furanone is a component of the flavor of pineapple—will be talking about this in my next post.
Turns out that raw chocolate has neither of these compounds to any great extent (Maarse says it has none), but Furaneol® appears with conching—the longer the conch, the greater the amount. That said, it does not have a characteristic chocolate flavor and it is not among the handful of chemicals that do.****
If you taste fresh good quality strawberries (am thinking of the wild strawberries I've picked) they have a sweet warm taste, with no hint of hotness or spice. I've found that strawberries go well with foods that activate warm receptors, such as TRPV3, but not with foods that activate TRPV1, chocolate among them. What I mean is that the flavor of one or the other is eclipsed, depending on which one is more abundant in the mouth at the moment. Or if both are available in more or less equal flavor quantity, you taste neither.
That is why chocolate-covered strawberries, so pretty to look at, never seem to quite live up to their promise.
* Yes, Furaneol® is a registered trademark of Firmenich SA, Geneva, Switzerland, and should be capitalized and have a ® next to it.
** Buying this book is not for those who are light of purse or who faint at the sight of chemistry...but it is amazingly encyclopedic and compiles data from the heyday of flavor analysis. A great starting point for further reading.
*** It stinks at high concentration—there are even patents for products to cover up the smell.
**** Counet, C; Callemien, D; Ouwerx, C; Collin, S. Use of gas chromatography-olfactometry to identify key volatiles in dark chocolate. Comparison of samples before and after conching. JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL AND FOOD CHEMISTRY, ISSN 0021-8561, 04/2002, Volume 50, Issue 8, pp. 2385 - 2391.
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