High quality chocolate has a ton of different flavours in it. It’s extremely complex. Just like coffee, tea, wine, beer, vanilla, spirits, cheese, mushrooms (an

High quality chocolate has a ton of different flavours in it. It’s extremely complex. Just like coffee, tea, wine, beer, vanilla, spirits, cheese, mushrooms (and so on; basically any luxury food). We can’t synthesize what makes these things taste good because it isn’t just one compound, it’s thousands. Even something very basic you can make at home, such as caramel, can’t be synthesized. From a very simple precursor (white sugar aka sucrose) you apply heat and the result is thousands of complex molecules. This is why caramel tastes good (like an actual food) but plain white sugar tastes pretty bad (because it’s just an ingredient).