Hojicha and Chocolate Pairing

As many of my tea buddies know, I’ve been on a hojicha kick lately. In fact, the last tea I reviewed for this blog was a hojicha:  Mighty Leaf Organic Hojicha Green Tea.

Partly because I’ve been in a mildly perverse mood lately, and partly because I saw ad copy in which a hojicha was described as “almost mocha-like”, I thought it would be great fun to pair hojicha with chocolate.  I chose Mighty Leaf Organic Hojicha Green Tea, plus Chocolove’s Strong Dark and Milk Chocolate bars.  Chocolove does not offer a white chocolate, so I went with the reliable Lindt White Chocolate bar.

(Incidentally, if you are a chocolate lover, Chocolove is a brand that you need to check out if you haven’t already.  Their strong dark chocolate is a revelation: As creamy as any milk chocolate that I have ever had, but both dairy free and with the robust, but not bitter, taste of dark chocolate. This is an excellent alternative to milk chocolate for those who cannot, or will not, eat dairy.)

So here is how the chocolate and the tea paired up:

Chocolove Strong Dark, 70% : I had thought that this would be the best pairing. Hojicha, being that it is roasted, is often compared to coffee in flavor, and coffee and dark chocolate are a natural match.  But I honestly felt that the two flavors completely bypassed each other: I had a bite of chocolate, which tasted nice, and then a sip of tea, which also tasted nice.  There was no melding of the flavors. It may be that since both are smoky/robust in flavor, they canceled each other out.

Lindt White Chocolate: I confess to not being overly fond of white chocolate, unless it is used to coat a cookie or as an ingredient in a cake filling/frosting. In a recent review, I paired Mighty Leaf’s Organic Spring Jasmine with a white chocolate coated cookie, and it was a delightful match. So I had high hopes for the pairing of Mighty Leaf’s hojicha with Lindt White Chocolate.

While the match wasn’t bad, the truth is that, as with the dark chocolate, the flavors just didn’t meld. In fact, the smoky tea basically acted as a very-effective palate cleanser between bites of the sweet, buttery, bland white chocolate. It certainly was a functional pairing (i.e. tea as palate cleanser) but the flavors of both tea and chocolate didn’t sing together.

Chocolove Milk Chocolate 33%: Surprisingly, this was my favourite pairing.  The “cancellation” effect of the Chocolove Strong Dark Chocolate and the hojicha was primarily due to their similarity in flavor, while the polar oppositeness of Mighty Leaf Organic Hojicha and Lindt White Chocolate was simply too strong a contrast. The Chocolove Milk Chocolate 33%, on the other hand, married well with the hojicha: The smokey, roasted notes of the hojicha was a nice balance to the sweetness of the chocolate, yet the spicy cocoa of the chocolate was a surprisingly good counter to the background roasted leak character of the hojicha.

A surprise outcome, indeed!

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Tagged as: chocolate, chocolove, dark chocolate, Green Tea, hojicha, Mighty Leaf, milk chocolate, tea and chocolate pairing, white chocolate