Sweaty, vinegary and sweet odors mingle to make dark chocolate’s smell
Researchers reconstructed the aroma in the lab
Scientists have sniffed out the chemicals that give some dark chocolates their smell.
The compounds that mingle to make the candy’s aroma include pleasant-smelling ones such as vanillin, which gives vanilla its smell, and flowery linalool. But other molecules produce smoky or vinegary odors and even one that smells like sweat, researchers report online May 8 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
“These single odorants usually never have the typical smell of the food itself,” says Michael Granvogl, a food chemist at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. Instead, in any given food, the scent depends on which molecules are present and at what level, he says.