3 Ways Tea & Chocolate Can Make Beautiful Music Together

Tea and chocolate are complementary, so of course you can drink tea and eat chocolate, but what about tea in your chocolate? Tea flavored chocolate bars offer many delicious opportunities for both chocolate and tea lovers. Chocolatiers and tea experts propose some delicious strategies for pairing teas in chocolate bars.

There isn’t just one way of melding tea in a chocolate bar. To name a few, you can infuse the tea in the cocoa solids (like cocoa butter or cocoa powder) or milk that you use in milk chocolate. You can grind tea into powder and include it in the bar or you can add tea leaves to the chocolate, either in the bar or pressed on top.

The best reason to add tea into chocolate is that it helps enhance the flavors of both ingredients. “The purpose of any kind of pairing, whether it be tea and chocolate, or wine and chocolate, is this idea of the third flavor,” William Mullan, brand director of Raaka Chocolate, explained, that it’s “bringing out the best in one another or bringing about something exciting in one another.”

Build Complementary Flavors

With Raaka’s tea bars Mullan said, “What we're trying to do there is tea and chocolate in a way that creates a flavor profile that we find complementary to the bean we’re using.” For example, they sell Green Tea Crunch and Unroasted Dark Chocolate (66% cacao). For the bar. Raaka used a Dominican bean that has “a nutty, earthy and slightly fruity flavor profile.” Raaka adds Rishi genmaicha green tea to the cocoa butter which adds a toasty rice, popcorn flavor.

Martin Diez, Director of Chef Services Americas for Barry Callebaut, one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world, recommended using a white chocolate with a rooibos tea, a red tea with no caffeine. Rooibos is “round, sweet and has vanilla notes,” Diez said, which works with the chocolate and its sweetness.

Matcha and white chocolate is a popular chocolate bar combination. Raaka has a vegan Matcha Waffle Cone with white chocolate. Mullan called it a “classic combo.” He explained that “white chocolate is just such a great vessel for something like Matcha.” There’s the vibrant green that comes through in the white chocolate as well as “a totally clean slate for that flavor to come through.” And as a bonus, Matcha appears to have health benefits too.

Jennifer Billock, certified tea specialist and author, noted, “I personally think that it goes best with a white chocolate or milk chocolate. The powder is mixed in while they're grinding the bean” to make the chocolate bar.

Bold flavors can also work together. Billock recalled a dark chocolate bar with Earl Grey sprinkled on top. “ I thought that it would be gross because it was crunchy tea. But it was actually really, really good. The flavor of the tea was more concentrated than I expected because it hadn't been brewed,” she explained.

Focus on Contrasting Flavors

Martin Diez, Director of Chef Services Americas for Barry Callebaut, one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world, pointed out that “there is pairing by contrast or pairing by alliance.” He explained that while you can pair the sourness, smoothness or sweet notes with something that is more bitter or strong.

For instance, Diez recommended using smoky full bodied tea, like Lapsang Souchong, with white chocolate. “You will appreciate the smokiness and you also appreciate the smoothness of the other one. That's when it's working together”, Diez said.

Another contrasting pairing is ground up Earl Grey tea in ruby chocolate, which has a fruity and sour taste. He said there are plenty of teas that go well with ruby tea but this combination in the bar works well. “The taste of the tea is going to come at the end because you need to completely melt the chocolate to dissolve those fats, and then to start to infuse or soak a little bit of tea in your mouth in order to get the taste of the infusion. We’re creating a symphony of taste,” Diez explained.

Create a Taste of Nostalgia

Combining tea and chocolate can create nostalgic flavors. For instance, Mullan said that the Green Tea Crunch bar is kinda like an “adult Crunch bar” with the puffed quinoa. But it’s more than a Crunch bar; it has what Mullan called “a sophisticated edge that we’ve achieved through tea steeping.”

Previously, Raaka had a chocolate bar that contained Lapsang Souchong, which Mullan described it as having a mysterious smoky quality that kinda reminded people of s’mores.

Mullan warned that one of the challenges of combining chocolate and tea (or other ingredients) is that chocolate has a strong flavor profile. When you put tea into a chocolate bar, it can overpower and smother another ingredient. “Gram by gram, it’s more chocolate than it is anything else,” Mullan said, “and it has to be because you know people want a chocolate bar when they buy a chocolate bar.”

So if you are a tea drinker, go out and find delicious tea chocolate bars. Or if you are a chocolate lover, go out and try a new infused/enhanced chocolate bar.