What Earl Grey does with chocolate...

Earl Grey tea is special case when it comes to pairings, because it combines black tea with bergamot. While black tea mainly activates the warm and “hot” receptors, the major chemical components in bergamot, a citrus fruit, activate the “cool” and “cold” receptors, just as do those in lemon.  This sets up a conflict for the person looking for interesting pairings—do you emphasize bergamot’s flavors, or do you favor the black tea’s?  Is there a way to give both equal billing when paired with some other food?

Interestingly, chocolate—pure unsweetened chocolate, that is—covers the same taste spectrum as Earl Grey tea, which is probably why many people have tried to create chocolates and chocolate cakes containing Earl Grey tea. However these confections also contain sugar, vanilla, and fat. The results have sometimes been good, but none are spectacular in my experience. You can taste the bergamot, or (sometimes) the chocolate, or the black tea, but usually not all the flavors together.

Bergamot fruit

Image by Flickr user: Xenocryst @ Antares Scorpii, from Wikipedia.

But sip Earl Grey tea and eat 86% cacao chocolate with low vanilla, or, even better, eat unsweetened chocolate that has not been alkalinized. Suddenly you have a burst of flavor that combines the best of all three: bergamot, black tea, and chocolate, without too much of the perfumey quality of the tea that can appear with chocolate containing less cacao and more vanilla.

The reason you need high cacao content, and as little cacao butter, vanilla, and sugar as possible, is that:

• the cacao butter inhibits the “hot” receptor, so you can't taste the black tea's qualities or the chocolate's;
• the vanilla activates the "warm" receptors, which in turn conflicts with both the "hot" receptors activated by the black tea, and the "cool" receptors activated by the bergamot;
• finally, the sugar turns on the "warm" receptor as well, thus further muddying the flavor profile of the combination, and it also dampens the slight touch of bitterness that brightens the flavors of both the chocolate and the tea.