Shiny, velvety chocolate that snaps within the fingers and melts within the mouth is the chocolatier’s dream.
However crafting cocoa confections with this optimum texture isn’t any straightforward feat. The endeavor, often known as tempering, calls for fastidiously warming and cooling liquid chocolate till it crystallizes into its most delectable type. Now, scientists might have discovered a shortcut: including a small pinch of fatty molecules known as phospholipids, researchers report August 31 in Nature Communications.
With phospholipids, “you’ll be able to simplify the entire tempering course of, ensuring you all the time have the correct high quality of the chocolate,” says meals chemist Alejandro Marangoni of the College of Guelph in Canada.
Inquisitive about what happens on a molecular stage throughout tempering, Marangoni and colleagues centered on the ingredient that offers chocolate its texture — cocoa butter. Whereas earlier tempering analysis had focused cocoa butter’s foremost part, triglycerides, the crew set its sights on a distinct candy spot: the minor parts, which embody free fatty acids and phospholipids. Eradicating these minor parts from the cocoa butter and including them again in one after the other allowed the researchers to determine every part’s position throughout tempering.
With only a pinch of phospholipids added to the cocoa butter — reaching a weight focus of 0.1 p.c of the chocolate’s complete — the combination quickly crystallized into the elusive, melt-in-the-mouth texture. The method required a single cooling to twenty˚ Celsius relatively than a number of heating and cooling cycles as tempering usually calls for.
Subsequent, the crew elevated the phospholipid weight focus in melted darkish chocolate by an additional 0.1 p.c, and simply produced high-quality textures once more. The consequence means that phospholipids could possibly be used to simplify chocolate tempering.
The hack may assist small-scale chocolatiers keep away from the issues and bills related to tempering machines, Marangoni says. Massive-scale producers, alternatively, would want to determine how you can evenly disperse phospholipids in a big vat of molten chocolate, he says.
