G-n-L Ganesh and Lauren

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Mini-Adventure 8: Phillip Island

Monday, 15 February 2010

Wow... It's been a rather hectic few weeks... With the couch surfer, outings, cleaning up the yard for the first bbq on the mexican chiminea and starting off my involvement in the Transition Town movement - valentine's day was a rewarding and relaxing day of fun...

G and I have agreed that instead of getting involved in the consumerism of the event we should organise to do something together each Valentine's Day... last year we went horse riding through wineries... this year we decided to use our Christmas Presents (jet boating at Phillip Island!)... On the way down to Phillip Island we stopped off at the Cranbourne Botanical Gardens to get ideas for our front yard. An award winning garden it may be, but it was not in the least bit inspiring. It was definitely a beneficial stop though because it turned out to be hard rubbish day in Cranbourne - or a 'Gold Mine' as G termed it. We now have a large assorted array of power tools in various states of disrepair that will soon sit proudly in our shed :-)

The next stop, just over the bridge was the Phillip Island Chocolate Factory. A feast for all the senses we just had to stop for a delicious hot chocolate given the stormy weather. I can still taste the melted chocolate pouring down my throat... mmmm....

We were very lucky in that the thunderstorms held out long enough for us to be thrown around on choppy seas in western port bay... A couple of times we were literally thrown from our seats as the boat swerved over large waves and lept across the ocean. We saved the penguins for next time and headed back to Melbourne to discover free mulch - a feast for the veggie patch! And to implement G's method of super savings shopping... (I've put G in charge of all food preparation this week while I take over the garden and chook care)... should be fun! :-)

Labels: botanical gardens, chocolate, hard rubbish, jet boating, mini-adventure, phillip island

Sweet science

Tuesday, 24 February 2009

I visited the synchrotron today... There's something extremely attractive about electrons circulating at the speed of light emitting massive amounts of bremsstrahlung radiation.. Perhaps you had to have studied physics to understand?? At any rate they were undertaking an extremely important process that is very close to my heart... Researchers from cadbury were seeking to understand the chocolate making process at the molecular level to make it smoother... mmmmm..... It almost made me forgive the Gigaelectron volts of energy required to run the synchrotron!

The art of chocolate making is fairly straightforward — in theory. Seeds from the cacao bush are broken up into cocoa powder and cocoa butter. Then they are recombined to make chocolate.The resulting chocolate is essentially a suspension of cocoa powder in fat. The recipe might seem simple but it is frustratingly deceptive: the wrong conditions can produce chocolate that is too hard, doesn’t ‘melt in the mouth’, or develops a white surface bloom in storage.

Food scientists have long known that as cocoa butter cools it can solidify into several different crystalline structures. Most agree there are six crystal structures, prosaically named polymorph I to VI. Polymorph V makes the best chocolate. It has a melting point just below body temperature so it dissolves in the mouth. But polymorph V is difficult to make and converts to
other polymorphs. The key to making polymorph V is tempering — quickly cooling the hot mixture produces low number polymorphs. With slow reheating these turn to polymorph V. So what is the optimum combination of heating, cooling and
stirring needed to deliver smooth, melt-in-the-mouth, polymorph V chocolate?

That’s where synchrotron light comes in. It allows the crystal structures to be monitored as they are forming, while
the cocoa butter is being heated, tempered and stirred. The intensity of synchrotron light makes such in situ
experiments possible. They found, for example, that stirring is critical to the formation of polymorph V. Most importantly, the data showed the optimum conditions for chocolate manufacture. Cadbury lowered tempering temperatures significantly, bringing energy and cost savings, and optimised a complex process, with subsequent benefits to profits.

Scientific... Sustainable... And Super Sweet!!

Labels: chocolate, synchrotron

Chocoholic

Thursday, 12 February 2009

I'm not sure I would want to live in a world without chocolate. I find it hard to not think about chocolate on a daily basis, let alone face a lifetime without it... especially when I haven't fulfilled my dream of spending the day under a chocolate fountain!

But according to the Nature Conversation Research Council (NCRC) in 20 years chocolate will become like caviar... Very expensive and available to only a select few... The problem comes down to unsustainable farming practices in countries like Ghana where cocoa plants grow (they are limited to a range of only 10 degrees from the equator)... Cocoa is traditionally a rainforest tree that lasts 75-100 years... Because of increased demand rainforest is being cleared to plant cocoa in open fields where it only lasts 30 years. After 30 years the land is so degraded that more rainforest must be cleared to plant more cocoa... A vicious and never ending cycle.

Chocolate, however, remains one of the most delicious, in demand, smartest foods on earth... Fortunately EarthShare has stepped in and is working with Cadbury and the farmers to create a more sustainable future for chocolate... And companies like Cocoa Farm have begun sustainably growing cocoa and producing chocolate in Queensland.

Until then I will try to breed a super cacao tree that grows in Melbourne (my backyard), produces sweet cocoa beans (perhaps graft it with sugar cane?) and is available all year round... A super plant if you will. Hopefully cadbury will purchase it from me for the cost of my liposuction should I succeed!

Labels: chocolate

$5000 bonus...

Friday, 19 December 2008

My sincere thanks to all those who voted... The picture to the left was chosen as the winner of the environmental prize!!!! We have our start up funds for the new venture :-) This is so so exciting!! It's really hard to believe one person could win a $10000 environmental prize AND a $5000 environmental prize all in 1 year but as I always say, anything is possible... This is the boost the project needed to get off the ground over christmas/new year...

I also made a fantastic discovery today... Health by Chocolate - fantastically organic chocolate, supposedly good for the environment AND good for your health. No more low iron or low anything else... I can chocolate way my good health! Unfortunately it's only available in the US... But Xin and I tried to create healthy, study enhancing chocolate during exams once so perhaps there is another business opportunity for us there! I have always wanted to make chocolate, from crushing the cacao beans to decorating the wrappers... and now that there is a plantation in Queensland it can be sustainable as well as healthy!

This blog is a bit all over the place today... I'll put more consistent and better blogging on my list of new years resolutions too, but I just felt I needed to mention a few startling facts.... Grace, an old friend from school recently recommended I read The Honey Spinner a worldwide honey adventure (yum!). The narrator (also named Grace) drizzles her way through various pots of 'liquid gold' discovering some serious issues behind the tasty industry. Albert Einstein once said that: 'If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man'. While the current focus is on the US financial crisis another crisis is unfolding, the ramifications of which might prove to be just as serious. Colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon that has been called the Marie Celeste of the bee world, has been occurring since 2006. Colonies of adult bees just disappear. Few bodies are ever found and tests show that they are full of pathogens. Nearly a third of honeybee colonies have been destroyed by the syndrome and scientists do not yet know why it is occurring. I really don't know what we can do about this, but more people should know!

To really top off a very varied post, I couldn't resist including the story of another crazy Tesla devotee (my dad is another)... Tesla, while a great physicist, was slightly troubled in that he used to vibrate buildings at the exact frequency that it took to make them collapse... He was also famous for the Tesla coil... A doctor in Western Australia has chosen to follow in his footsteps make electrical art, Tesla style. Warren has launched Tesla Downunder to showcase his artistc experiments which use up to 500000 volts from the mains, and a long exposure camera...

Thanks again for your votes!!

Labels: bees, chocolate, competition, environmentalism, honey, winner