Honey and chocolate

Cocoa percentage sets the brief

Above about seventy per cent cocoa, a chocolate's bitterness and astringency dominate its sweetness, with the bean's own fermentation-derived fruit sitting underneath. A honey with its own bitterness meets the first as an equal; a honey with fruit or acidity amplifies the second. Chestnut with dark chocolate is the classic demonstration of both at once.

Milk chocolate inverts it. At thirty to forty per cent cocoa with milk solids and a great deal of sugar, sweetness has nowhere further to go, and adding a sweet mild honey adds nothing but calories. What works is contrast: bitterness, resin, smoke or mineral character gives the palate somewhere to move.

White chocolate has no cocoa solids at all — only cocoa butter, sugar and milk. There is no bitterness to answer and a great deal of fat to carry aroma, which makes it the one chocolate where a delicate perfumed honey is displayed rather than erased.

The physics: why it seizes

Melted chocolate is a suspension of cocoa solids and sugar in cocoa butter, and it is essentially water-free. Honey is seventeen to twenty per cent water. Introducing that water causes the sugar particles to clump and the whole thing to thicken into a grainy paste — the same seizing that a drop of water causes, for the same reason.

How to taste them together

1. 1Bring both to room temperatureCold chocolate releases very little aroma and cold honey is thick and mute. Twenty minutes out of the fridge changes the pairing more than switching either partner would.
2. 2Taste each alone firstKnow what the chocolate is doing before the honey arrives, or you will not be able to tell what changed.
3. 3Chocolate first, then honeyLet the chocolate melt on the tongue, then add a small amount of honey. Honey first coats the palate with sugar and flattens what follows.
4. 4Add saltA few grains of flaky salt with milk chocolate and a bitter honey is the single largest improvement available, and it costs nothing.