What Is Aroma?

Grab a piece of your favorite chocolate bar (in my case, it’s usually the ones with bits of toasted hazelnuts), use your fingers to clamp your nose shut, and put the chocolate in your mouth. Slowly start to eat it and pay attention to what you taste and smell. The sweet and bitter notes will be prominent; depending on how the chocolate is prepared, you might also notice some sourness. But can you pick up the smell of the cocoa? Probably not. Now release your fingers from your nose and continue to eat the chocolate. Now you can smell the rich scent of the cocoa along with the other flavor molecules in the bar; this is aroma. This aroma or scent is a mixture of various types of tiny flavor compounds small enough to quickly vaporize into gas at room temperature and travel in the air right to your nose.