Tag Archives: chocolate

3D print healthy chocolates

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I’m a little late for Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2023, but it’s not too late for chocolate.

A February 14, 2023 news item on ScienceDaily describes research into 3D printing ‘healthy’ chocolates,

A Rutgers [Rutgers State University of New Jersey, US] scientist has developed a formulation of low-fat chocolate that can be printed on a 3D printer in pretty much any shape a person can conceive, including a heart.

…

A February 13, 2023 Rutgers University news release (also on EurekAlert but published February 14, 2023) by Kitta MacPherson, which originated the news item, describes research into ‘functional foods’,

The work heralds what the researcher hopes will be a new line of “functional foods” – edibles specially designed with health benefits. The aim is to develop healthier kinds of chocolate easily accessible to consumers.

Reporting in the scientific journal, Food Hydrocolloids, a Rutgers-led team of scientists described the successful creation and printing of a mixture producing low-fat chocolate — substituting fatty cocoa butter with a lower-fat, water-in-oil emulsion.

“Everybody likes to eat chocolate, but we are also concerned with our health,” said Qingrong Huang, a professor in the Department of Food Science at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “To address this, we have created a chocolate that is not only low-fat, but that can also be printed with a 3D printer. It’s our first ‘functional’ chocolate.”

Huang, an author of the study, said he already is working on manipulating sugar content in the new chocolate formulation for low-sugar and sugar-free varieties.

Researchers create emulsions by breaking down two immiscible liquids into minute droplets. In emulsions, the two liquids will usually quickly separate – as is the case with oil and vinegar – unless they are held together by a third, stabilizing ingredient known as an emulsifier. (An egg is the emulsifier in a vinaigrette.)

Chocolate candy is generally made with cocoa butter, cocoa powder and powdered sugar and combined with any one of a variety of different emulsifiers.

For the study, the scientific team experimented with different ratios of the ingredients for a standard chocolate recipe to find the best balance between liquid and solid for 3D printing. Seeking to lower the level of fat in the mixture, researchers created a water-in-cocoa butter emulsion held together by gum arabic, an extract from the acacia tree that is commonly used in the food industry, to replace the cocoa butter. The researchers mixed the emulsion with golden syrup to enhance the flavor and added that combination to the other ingredients.

As delightful as it is to eat, Huang said, chocolate is a material rich with aspects for food scientists to explore.

Employing advanced techniques examining the molecular structure and physical properties of chocolate, researchers investigated the printed chocolate’s physical characteristics. They were seeking the proper level of viscosity for printing and looking for the optimal texture and smoothness “for a good mouthfeel,” Huang said. Experimenting with many different water-oil ratios, they varied the percentages of all the main ingredients before settling on one mixture.

In 3D printing, a printer is used to create a physical object from a digital model by laying down layers of material in quick succession. The 3D printer, and the shapes it produces, can be programmed by an app on a cellphone, Huang said.

Ultimately, Huang said he plans to design functional foods containing healthy added ingredients – substances he has spent more than two decades studying, such as extracts from orange peel, tea, red pepper, onion, Rosemary, turmeric, blueberry and ginger – that consumers can print and eat.

“3D food printing technology enables the development of customized edible products with tailored taste, shape and texture as well as optimal nutrition based on consumer needs,” Huang said.

Other researchers on the study included Siqi You and Xuanxuan Lu of the Department of Food Science and Engineering at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Development of fat-reduced 3D printed chocolate by substituting cocoa butter with water-in-oil emulsions by Siqi You, Qingrong Huang, and Xuanxuan Lu. Food Hydrocolloids Volume 135, February 2023, 108114 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodhyd.2022.108114

This paper is behind a paywall.

Chocolate at Canada’s synchrotron (Canadian Light Source; CLS)

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An August 31, 2021 Canadian Light Source (CLS) news release by Erin Matthews describes research which could change how chocolate is made,

Scientists used synchrotron technology to show a key ingredient can create the ideal chocolate structure and could revolutionize the chocolate industry.

Structure is key when it comes creating the best quality of chocolate. An ideal internal structure will be smooth and continuous, not crumbly, and result in glossy, delicious, melt-in-your-mouth decadence. However, this sweet bliss is not easy to achieve.

Researchers from the University of Guelph had their first look at the detailed structure of dark chocolate using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan. Their results were published today in Nature Communications.

“One of the major problems in chocolate making is tempering,” said Alejandro Marangoni, a professor at the University of Guelph and Canada Research Chair in Food, Health and Aging. “Very much like when you temper steel, you have to achieve a certain crystalline structure in the cocoa butter.”

Skilled chocolate makers [emphasis mine] use specialized tools and training to manipulate cocoa butter for gourmet chocolate. However, Marangoni wondered if adding a special ingredient to chocolate could drive the formation of the correct crystal structure without the complex cooling and mixing procedures typically used by chocolatiers during tempering.

“Imagine if you could add a component that directs the entire crystallization process to a high-quality finished product. You wouldn’t need fancy tempering protocols or industrial machines — you could easily achieve the desired crystalline form just by the addition of this component,” Marangoni said.

His team went to the CLS to see if their secret ingredient, a specific phospholipid, could drive the formation of an ideal chocolate structure. The facility’s bright light, which is millions of times brighter than the sun, allowed the team to get images of the interior structure of their dark chocolate in exquisite detail.

“We have some of the most beautiful micrographs of the finished chocolate that were only possible because we did this work at the CLS,” said Marangoni.

In a world first, the researchers were able to get detailed imaging of the internal structure of dark chocolate, thanks to the synchrotron’s state of the art BMIT beamline.

“Working with the CLS, I would call it a next level interaction,” Marangoni added. “It was extremely easy to set up a project and we had enormous support from beamline scientists.”

In collaboration with CLS Plant Imaging Lead Jarvis Stobbs, Marangoni and colleagues were able to confirm the positive effect their ingredient had on obtaining the ideal structure for chocolate.

“We screened many minor lipid components that would naturally be present in chocolate and identified one preferred group. We then added a very specific molecule, a saturated phospholipid, to the chocolate mass and obtained the desired effect. This phospholipid formed a specific liquid crystal structure that would ‘seed’ the formation of cocoa butter crystals,” said Marangoni.

Their discovery that this phospholipid ingredient will drive the formation of ideal cocoa butter crystals could have a big impact on the way that chocolate is made.

“It could potentially revolutionize the chocolate industry, because we would not need very complex tempering machines,” Marangoni said. “This could open up the possibility for smaller manufacturers to produce chocolate without having the big capital investment for tempering machinery.”

Synchrotron research allows scientists to identify important details that are not possible to find with other techniques. Marangoni said that any small improvement on current manufacturing methods can have a very large impact on the food industry and can potentially save money for companies.

He added that while chocolate research pales in comparison to global problems, he emphasizes the impact food can have on our everyday lives.

“We have more serious problems like climate change and alternative energies and maybe even vegan foods, which we’re working on as well, but chocolate gives us that psychological pleasure. It’s one of these foods that makes us feel happy.”

This video shows the researcher’s delight,

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Tempering of cocoa butter and chocolate using minor lipidic components by Jay Chen, Saeed M. Ghazani, Jarvis A. Stobbs & Alejandro G. Marangoni. Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 5018 (2021) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25206-1 Published 31 August 2021

This paper is open access.

According to a Sept. 2, 2021 article by Marc Fawcett-Atkinson for Canada’s National Observer, this work could lead to making chocolate production more sustainable

What happens to the skilled chocolate makers?

That’s one of my big questions. The other is what happens to us? In all these ‘improvements’ of which there are many being touted these days, what I notice is a lack of sensuality. In this particular case, no touch and no smell.

Preserving heritage smells (scents)

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Preserving a smell? It’s an intriguing idea and forms the research focus for scientists at the University College London’s (UCL) Institute for Sustainable Heritage according to an April 6, 2017 Biomed Central news release on EurekAlert,

A ‘Historic Book Odour Wheel’ which has been developed to document and archive the aroma associated with old books, is being presented in a study in the open access journal Heritage Science. Researchers at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage created the wheel as part of an experiment in which they asked visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral’s Dean and Chapter library in London to characterize its smell.

The visitors most frequently described the aroma of the library as ‘woody’ (selected by 100% of the visitors who were asked), followed by ‘smoky’ (86%), ‘earthy'(71%) and ‘vanilla’ (41%). The intensity of the smells was assessed as between ‘strong odor’ and ‘very strong odor’. Over 70% of the visitors described the smell as pleasant, 14% as ‘mildly pleasant’ and 14% as ‘neutral’.

In a separate experiment, the researchers presented visitors to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery with an unlabelled historic book smell – sampled from a 1928 book they obtained from a second-hand bookshop in London – and collected the terms used to describe the smell. The word ‘chocolate’ – or variations such as ‘cocoa’ or ‘chocolatey’ – was used most often, followed by ‘coffee’, ‘old’, ‘wood’ and ‘burnt’. Participants also mentioned smells including ‘fish’, ‘body odour’, ‘rotten socks’ and ‘mothballs’.

Cecilia Bembibre, heritage scientist at UCL and corresponding author of the study said: “Our odour wheel provides an example of how scientists and historians could begin to identify, analyze and document smells that have cultural significance, such as the aroma of old books in historic libraries. The role of smells in how we perceive heritage has not been systematically explored until now.”

Attempting to answer the question of whether certain smells could be considered part of our cultural heritage and if so how they could be identified, protected and conserved, the researchers also conducted a chemical analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which they sampled from books in the library. VOCs are chemicals that evaporate at low temperatures, many of which can be perceived as scents or odors.

Combining their findings from the VOC analysis with the visitors’ characterizations, the authors created their Historic Book Odour wheel, which shows the chemical description of a smell (such as acetic acid) together with the sensory descriptions provided by the visitors (such as ‘vinegar’).

Cecilia Bembibre said: “By documenting the words used by the visitors to describe a heritage smell, our study opens a discussion about developing a vocabulary to identify aromas that have cultural meaning and significance.”

She added: “The Historic Book Odour Wheel also has the potential to be used as a diagnostic tool by conservators, informing on the condition of an object, for example its state of decay, through its olfactory profile.”

The authors suggest that, in addition to its use for the identification and conservation of smells, the Historic Book Odour Wheel could potentially be used to recreate smells and aid the design of olfactory experiences in museums, allowing visitors to form a personal connection with exhibits by allowing them to understand what the past smelled like.

Before this can be done, further research is needed to build on the preliminary findings in this study to allow them to inform and benefit heritage management, conservation, visitor experience design and heritage policy making.

Here’s what the Historic Book Odour Wheel looks like,

Odour wheel of historic book containing general aroma categories, sensory descriptors and chemical information on the smells as sampled (colours are arbitrary) Courtesy: Heritage Science [downloaded from https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40494-016-0114-1

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Smell of heritage: a framework for the identification, analysis and archival of historic odours by Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič. Heritage Science20175:2 DOI: 10.1186/s40494-016-0114-1 Published: 7 April 2017

©  The Author(s) 2017

This paper is open access.

Is chocolate disappearing?

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It looks like the cacao plant used for chocolate production is at risk of being wiped out. Grrlscientist at the Guardian science blogs featured the story in her Jan. 11, 2012 posting.

… despite chocolate’s popularity in the United States and Europe, the cacao plant is in trouble. …

The most common way of growing cacao is in a monoculture, the same way that corn is grown, which makes plants much more susceptible to a plethora of diseases and pest infestations, says Dr Almeda [botanist Frank Almeda, senior curator at the California Academy of Sciences]. Making things worse, cacao farmers make less than one dollar a day, so cultivating cacao isn’t even economically feasible, so farmers are abandoning their cacao plantations.

Here’s a video from the California Academy of Sciences about chocolate,

Grrlscientist mentions corn as another food which is monoculture-cultivated and I’m going add banana as another one of these monoculture food plants and that, too, is in danger, not for the first time. (I’m not sure about whether corn is in immediate danger or not.) There’s a type of banana that we no longer eat, Gros Michel. Our grandparents did and, by all accounts, it was a better tasting banana than the one we have now but it was wiped out by disease.

Agribusiness interests found an alternative, the Cavendish banana, which is now in danger of being wiped out. (What is that saying about repeating the practices that you got into trouble in the first place and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity?) There’s  lots of information about the banana situation on the web and I found this US National Public Radio (NPR) interview from July 22, 2011 with Dan Koeppel, science writer and author of “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” which features a transcript of the interview, as well as, the audio file.

I know I don’t usually write about this kind of thing but 20 years ago when I was completing my undergraduate degree, I took a course where we discussed the issue of monoculture and the danger of relying on one species of food plant , and just couldn’t resist writing about this any longer.