Cocoa: the fermented, roasted bean behind gourmand notes

Where does cocoa come from?

Cocoa beans are the dried and fully fermented seeds of Theobroma cacao, a tree native to the Amazon rainforest, explains Wikipedia's article on the cocoa bean. After harvest, the pods are opened and the seeds and pulp are heaped up for several days to ferment, then dried. Roasting comes next, and its time and temperature shape the result: a low roast gives a more acidic, aromatic flavour, a high roast a more intense, bitter one.

The French Wikipedia entry adds that roasting at 100 to 140 °C triggers Maillard reactions that create some 500 volatile compounds of chocolate aroma.

What does cocoa smell like?

Cocoa smells of chocolate, with a powdery texture. The IFRA Fragrance Ingredient Glossary files cacao absolute, extract, tincture and oil under gourmand, with chocolate and powdery nuances. IFRA defines gourmand as a sweet, sticky, dessert-like smell that runs from caramel and fudge to chocolate and meringue.

What does cocoa do in a perfume?

Cocoa feeds gourmand accords, a category of scents with edible or dessert-like qualities that often contains vanilla, tonka bean and coumarin, plus synthetic components designed to resemble food flavours, according to Wikipedia's perfume article. The palette also includes molecules that IFRA describes as cocoa or chocolate, several of them pyrazines. Cocoa belongs to the amber family.

What else should you know about cocoa?

• Coffee also owes its aroma to roasting: compare the two smells on the coffee page.
• One molecule, benzalacetone, contributes to the smell of cocoa, jasmine and strawberry.
• Absolutes come from solvent extraction, a method covered in the Class on how fragrance is extracted.