Chocolate pairing is an important factor to consider while designing your creation!
Unless your dessert is purely made of chocolate, all other ingredients should be put into consideration while designing creation, also it will be good to decide on which is the primary ingredient and the secondary ingredients.
Let's go straight into some simple pairing combinations for each type of chocolate.
Dark Couvertures and Chocolates
Fruits
Generally, dark chocolate are a perfect match with fruits that are sour and with acidic profiles such as Orange, Yuzu, Passionfruit and Raspberry. Some specific dark chocolate are also great when match with sweet and strong frontal flavour fruits like Banana, Cherry and Mango.
Nuts
Dark chocolate are perfect with nuts like hazelnuts, almonds and macadamia as it is able to amplify the taste of nuts without losing its own unique taste profile.
Milk Chocolate
Fruits
Milk Chocolate matches very well with sweet and fragrant fruits that have slight acidity such as Mango and Apricot. Coconut are also commonly used with milk chocolate to bring out its creamy and rich taste.
Nuts
Milk Chocolate is able to compliment well with most of the nuts including almond, pecan and peanuts. They are a heavenly match with peanuts and peanut butter, bringing out the best out of both ingredients.
Coffee, Tea and Spices
Milk chocolate that has lesser cocoa profile are suitable for coffee such as espresso and also tea like earl grey, jasmine, matcha and even Asian flavours such as thai milk tea.
Likewise, spices like Chai, Ginger and Star Anise are just some surprisingly good match with milk chocolate that are worth trying.
White Chocolate
Fruits and Florals
White chocolate makes a good pair with intense acidity fruits such as lemon, orange, blueberry and pineapple due to its sweet flavour. Florals like rose and lavender are able to retain their unique floral flavours when used with white chocolate.
Tea & Spices
White chocolate are more suitable for tea with subtle and light flavours like jasmine and green tea. Spice like real vanilla (pods) and saffron are used with white chocolate to create fresh combination for desserts.
In summary, by understanding and applying the nature of each types of chocolate, we can easily find the matching ingredients to use for any dessert.
The pairing list above is just for reference as the possibilities are exhaustive and its up to you to play around and explore the different combinations. Do try out some of these pariring and let us know what works best for you!
Love,
Pâtissier Chocolate