The Sweet Surprise that Sugar Diversity Makes in Chocolate

Over the past 25 years, craft chocolate makers have introduced us to the incredible flavor diversity of cacao. The bean-to-bar movement has put cacao center stage, celebrating different varieties and origins and the hundreds of flavor notes that chocolate can offer. Now, in the never-ending search for new sensory experiences, makers are beginning to explore the untapped potential of chocolate’s (arguably) second most important ingredient: sugar.

Types of Sugar

While some bars have 90-100% cacao, sugar is a vital component of most chocolate. It helps tame and balance the intensely bitter notes you’ll often find in cacao, while simultaneously enhancing the beautiful and delicate flavors. In great chocolate, sugar is the conductor of cacao’s symphony.

Sugar comes from various natural sources, including sugar beets, coconut palm flowers, agave, and maple trees, but the most common source is sugarcane. Delicious juice is squeezed from freshly harvested sugarcane before going through a complex set of processes, including evaporation, crystallization, and the separation of the crystals and the remaining syrup (molasses).

Sugar can be refined to varying degrees, with each point on the spectrum resulting in different flavors and colors. At one end you’ve got completely ‘unrefined’ dark sugar that is extremely flavorful, known as ‘panela’ in most Latin American countries or ‘jaggery’ in South Asia and parts of Africa. At the other end of the scale, you’ve got fully refined white sugar crystals, which contain 99% sucrose and offer virtually no flavor, just sweetness. In between those two styles, there’s a range of sugar types that includes turbinado (raw), muscovado, demerara, brown and more.

Unrefined sugar

Unrefined sugar, like panela, contains a lot of the thick, dark molasses syrup that gets extracted from your average sugar crystals. Panela is generally considered to taste like caramel or toffee, but New Zealand chocolate maker Johnty Tatham (aka Lucid Chocolatier) discovered a variety of panela flavors in different regions of Peru. “The panela that I first used was from [the region] VRAE… that one was naturally fruity and almost smelled floral. It was very complex,” says Johnty. “The first time I went to Peru we travelled up to San Martin and went to a place called Lamas… They had some panela, and I was blown away by how different it was to what I had back home. It smelt just like caramel.”

This discovery of different flavor profiles led Johnty to source a variety of panelas from different regions, and to choose specific panela flavours to pair with cacao or other ingredients in his chocolate. “I really feel like just putting white – or really refined – sugar in there is a missed opportunity for more complexity, to make the chocolate more unique.”

Sugar Terroir

If panela contains a variety of flavors, it leads to an intriguing question: does sugarcane have ‘terroir’? Terroir is a French term that describes how a specific place – its climate, soil, topography, and local environment – affects the taste and quality of agricultural products. A broader interpretation of terroir can also include local cultures and techniques for processing foods. In her 2008 book The Taste of Place, Professor Amy Trubek says “In the act of tasting, when a bite of food or a sip of wine moves through the mouth and into the body, culture and nature become one.”

Terroir is a term with roots in the wine industry, but it’s now also used in the world of chocolate, cheese, olive oil, and many other foods and beverages. The terroir of sugarcane is almost never discussed in chocolate, but it’s a more established concept in rum distilling. In an interview with Fine+Rare, Black Tot Global Ambassador Mitch Wilson said, “It might be tempting to consider molasses-based rums as lacking a sense of terroir (certainly in the wine sense), but this would be unfair… I’d be tempted to bet that given the opportunity to taste a line-up of single origin molasses from around the world that there would be enough variety to contribute to the idea of local terroir.”

Place and Processing

Aurelio Loret de Mola of Cacao Life in Peru supplies Johnty Tatham with cacao and panela, along with many other craft chocolate makers worldwide. Aurelio sources panela from farmers in several different regions of Peru, and he believes the difference in flavors is caused partly by the growing location and partly by the processing method. “When you grow sugarcane on the coast of Peru, this is a drier climate,” says Aurelio. “The nutrients are a lot more concentrated – there’s less water in the sugarcane… you get darker colors in the panela, and that concentrates the caramel flavor. In the jungle, the sugarcane contains a lot more water.”

Freshly squeezed sugarcane juice is cooked in a large pan (paella) over fire and reduced to a syrup. According to Aurelio, the size and heat of the flame can also affect the flavor of the panela. Some producers use a lower temperature, which results in less caramelization, whereas a higher temperature creates a darker, dryer, and deeper sugar.

The fruity and floral panelas that Johnty discovered contained more moisture than the more caramelized ones, so it’s likely that cooking the juice at lower temperatures helps to preserve the more nuanced and unique flavor notes. This would correspond with roasting cacao, where a hotter roast creates deeper, more caramelized flavors but reduces the amount of delicate ‘high notes.’

Choosing the Right Sugar

You might wonder why all chocolate makers don’t use more flavourful sugar, but sometimes those flavors can detract from – or interfere with – the natural flavors of cacao. Fruition Chocolate Works Founder Bryan Graham likes to keep certain single origin bars as pure as possible. “We have a 74% Madagascar bar that showcases that bright, acidic, fruity Madagascar hallmark… that cacao is so complex to begin with, that adding a sugar that has more caramel-y or molasses flavors might detract from the whole thing.”

Bryan uses an organic turbinado (aka raw) sugar from Brazil, which retains some caramel flavor but is less intense than something like panela. However, for some of Fruition’s milk, white and flavored bars, Bryan increases the caramelization by further processing the sugar in-house. “For some of our chocolate we’ll take our sugar and do a very slow caramelization to add a little extra color, flavor and depth.”

The Future of Flavor

Despite the fact that sugar is such an integral part of chocolate, it’s rare for chocolate makers to talk about the sugar they use. Most craft chocolate makers’ websites and wrappers are filled with information about the cacao they source, but you’ll rarely see sugar mentioned anywhere other than the ingredients list. Perhaps this is because many chocolate makers and consumers simply don’t find sugar as exciting as cacao. Generally, it’s valued only for its sweetness and isn’t considered a ‘serious food.’ However, thirty to forty years ago, the same could be said of cacao. Chocolate companies rarely talked about where their beans came from or what variety they were; they were just the mysterious ingredient that provided the ‘chocolatey’ flavor that people loved.

While sugar is less complex and may never become as interesting as cacao, it’s an incredibly unexplored and underdeveloped topic. There are many experiments and exciting flavor discoveries ahead. That’s good news for craft chocolate consumers, who are more educated and experienced than ever and constantly looking for the next new thing. Exploring specialty sugar can help chocolate makers unlock new flavor territory and create truly unique chocolate recipes.

Talking about his 72% Marańõn bar, Johnty Tatham said “How many chocolate makers around the world are using those beans? I don’t think any of them would have the same combination of beans and sugar that I have, which means that when you’re tasting it from me, it’s truly one of one.”