The Secret Ingredient A Chef Swears By To Make Chocolate More Flavourful (And No, It's Not Coffee)

If you love to cook, you’ll know that the strangest-sounding combinations often taste best.

Chocolate (and mango chutney, apparently) stuns in chilli; baking powder can take the acidic edge out of pasta sauce; even avocado has its place in your dessert.

Common culinary wisdom has it that coffee deepens and sweetens the richest, most unctuous flavours in cocoa, too.

But following The Great British Bake-Off’s recent Chocolate Week, chocolatier and author of Adventures With Chocolate, Paul A. Young, said that the basis of another hot drink is key to dishes like his chocolate mousse ― tea.

Why does tea make chocolate taste so much better?

For his chocola”tea” mousse, Young makes a “very strong tea syrup by bringing tea leaves and water to the boil”.

He then strains this and lets it infuse for five minutes before incorporating it into a sugar syrup.

The chocolatier explained, “tea and chocolate make a wonderful pairing as they both have tannins in common in their tasting notes”.

Tannins give foods like tea and chocolate their signature bitter tang and also appear in coffee and wine.

But, just like adding a splash of milk and sugar to your tea makes it less biting, Young adds both to his recipe “to balance the flavours and aftertaste, making the pairing comforting”.

“They’re wonderful with characterful dark chocolate with bold tastes and flavours. The tannins and bittersweet characters of dark chocolate can marry seamlessly with fine-quality black and green teas,” he said.