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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

posted by genloz at 9:45 PM 1 Comments