If it’s true that you can’t get enough of a good thing, that is even truer for chocolate. There have been many studies on why we love chocolate, why chocolate is good for you, why it is not good for you, you name it. But no matter what they say, chocolate will always be “the food of the gods”.
Let’s be optimistic and assume that we are allowed to eat chocolate, what is happening now is that scientist managed to produce a healthier product with a lower fat content. We surely are allowed to eat that, aren’t we?
Chemists at the University of Warwick have demonstrate a route toward the preparation of healthier fruit juice infused chocolate candy in a paper published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.
Replacing a considerable relative volume of cocoa butter is a high priority for manufacturers and one strategy is to introduce air bubbles into the chocolate to lower the fat content. This research follows a different approach: the idea is to replace the fat content in chocolate, which are cocoa butter and milk fats, with fruit juice in the form of emulsion droplets.
They encapsulated fruit juice within the chocolate formulation and compartmentalize the juice into droplets of less than 30 μm (that is 30 million of a metre) They used droplets which have solid particles adhered to their liquid-liquid interface, what is known as Pickering emulsion, because they have superior resistance against coalescence as the particles bound at the interface are restrained in a deep energy well.
In 2008 the RSC published Science of Chocolate by Stephen T Beckett, an international best seller that describes the complete chocolate making process, from the growing of the beans to the sale in the shops.
Watch Stephen T Beckett’s lecture at the Chemistry Centre here.
The book explores how confectionery is made and the way in which basic science plays a vital role, it’s a book about the journey of chocolate. Where does this journey start from?
Well, that is easy: chocolate grows on trees. Theobroma cacao is a plant original from the understory of the tropical and subtropical rainforest of Mexico, Central and the northern part of South America. It is a evergreen tree that grows between 5 to 10 meters. Theobroma means “food of the gods” (so, that is not just a saying, it is actually its name!) and cacao derives from “xocolatl” a word in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, where “xococ” means bitter and “atl” water.
Cocoa is a cauliflory tree: small pale flowers grow in clusters directly from its trunk, and, produced all year long, they are pollinated by midges. The fruits are elongated egg-shaped pods,15 to 25 cm long. Each fruit contains a bitter-sweet white pulp and up to 40 seeds.
To prove how popular the subject is, in 2012 the RSC published another book Chocolate as Medicine by Philip Wilson and Jeffrey Hurst, which describes the centuries-long quest to uncover chocolate's potential health benefits.
So, while we wait to taste some of the new healthier chocolate, let’s take a look at this video of Dominique Persoone, Belgium's most famous chocolatier...