>> ALEX: Hey guys, I'm here at the chocolate meuseum in Cusco, Peru, let's get technical.
I'm here to find out why chocolate is shiny. I guess I could have Googled it, but eh.
Have you ever noticed that?
It’s crazy, it’s one of those things you don’t notice or care about until you do.
I mean, chocolate doesn’t start off shiny, right?
It starts off with beans...
Or does it?
*Moon Men (Vsauce music) plays*
Wait, hold up, this isn’t vsauce, turn that off.
While these can vary depending on the type of chocolate you’re making, there are 3
main ingredients in chocolate: cacao paste, which is half cacao butter and half cocoa
powder, sugar, and cocoa nibs.
Wait a sec, I recognize nibs from somewhere.
>> TERRY: New case, new nib.
Read 20 words? That's a nib.
Muh, that nib was kinda small.
>> BOYLE: Hey Sarge, you may wanna slow down on those things.
>> TERRY: Things? These are the precious jewels of the rainforest, Boyle.
By the way, quick side note, for those who don’t watch Brooklyn 99, you totally should,
and for those who do watch Brooklyn 99, ohmygerd I can’t wait for season 5.
Season 4 ended on such a cliffhanger.
*eats a nib* In the season 3 episode “The Oolong Slayer,” Boyle introduces Terry to
cacao nibs, calling them, “happy little chocolaty delights from deep in the Peruvian
rain forest.”
*eats a nib* In reality, wouldn’t recommend cocoa nibs.
They’re nothing like chocolate and pretty bitter.
But, they’re crucial in the chocolate making process.
How?
Well, let me answer that by asking you this.
What role does a cocoa bean play in the chocolate making process?
>> CLONE: Uhh, don’t they just grind it up or something?
>> ALEX: Nope!
Beans have to be fermented, dried, and roasted before they can be put into a machine called
a winnower.
Winnowing is the process of removing the shell of the cocoa bean with what's inside, the
nib.
See, when you roast cocoa beans, the outer shell and inner nib are loosened.
Then, it’s easy for the winnower to rake, suck, and remove the two different parts.
The nibs are then grinded to turn into Chocolate liquor and pressed to turn into chocolate
powder, which, along with being used in the chocolate making process can also be used
to make hot chocolate and beauty products.
Hey, that’s pretty good.
>> IDUBBBZ: Hey, that’s pretty good.
>> ALEX: It actually is pretty good haha.
Cacao butter and cacao powder are held together with something called beta crystals.
Remember this, it gets important later.
So, this cacao paste, sugar, and cacao nibs are the ingredients that go into chocolate,
but it still isn’t shiny yet.
After mixing, refining, and conching, we finally get to the part of the process that turns
chocolate shiny: tempering.
But what is tempering?
Oh I don’t know, but, like usual, while I may not know something, I know someone who
does.
This guy is one of the amazing people who works over at ChocoMuseo, and I asked him.
Why is chocolate shiny?
>> CHOCOMUSEO: Shiny? Because the composition of cacao is 50% cacao butter and 50% cacao powder.
So cacao has beta crystals. This crystals maintain the butter and powder together in the cacao paste.
If you want to activate these crystals, the beta crystals, it's really important to make the tempering step.
In the tempering step, we're gonna activate the beta crystals.
Ok, wait up a sec, let’s break that down before we move on.
Chocolate is a polymorph.
Poly meaning many and morph meaning structure.
Many structures.
The official definition: a polymorph is a solid that can exist in multiple crystal structures.
A crystal is a group of atoms or molecules that have a specific organization to them,
and a crystal structure is exactly what it sounds like: the structure of the crystals.
Since chocolate is a polymorph, it’s can exist in different structures, 6 different
structures, to be exact.
This ability is largely due to the cocoa butter, or, more specifically, what's found inside
of it: oleic, palmitic, and stearic fatty acids.
Those are hard words.
Remember, only the crystal structure changes, chocolate is still chocolate and the molecules
or any of the actual chemical makeup doesn’t just swap in n out.
N- no not that in and out like swapping or something.
I wonder how many people are gonna get that joke.
I mean, yea, it only really lands if they know In and Out.
By the way, there’s no one over there, I’m just alone in my room, so that’s weird.
Anywho, this is where tempering comes in.
When chocolate cools at room temperature, it solidifies into crystals that are all different
shapes and sizes.
Tempering is where you control the firmness, taste, quality, and (what we’re interested
in) shininess of chocolate by getting your desired chocolate crystal structure using
a very controlled TEMPERature.
Please subscribe.
The perfect crystal structure for chocolate is the 5th or, as he says in the video the
beta crystal (those 2 ways of saying it, by the way, are interchangeable).
The 5th structure can be obtained by cooling the chocolate very slowly.
This maximizes the amount of form 5 chocolate and minimizes all the other forms.
Then, after your cool it down, you heat it right back up again to just below the melting
point of form 5, which is 33.8 degrees celsius.
THIS melts all of the other forms of chocolate besides form 5 because they have lower melting
points.
So in summary, to activate the beta crystals or the 5th form of chocolate, both are the
same thing, which is found in the cacao butter holding it and the cacao powder together,
you must temper the chocolate perfectly.
And it’s these beta crystals that make chocolate shiny.
Along with making chocolate shiny, we also have the beta crystals to thank for melty
in the mouth feel and that glorious, glorious snap.
*Alex snaps chocolate.* Oooooh man is that satisfying.
If you wanna pro weight-loss tip, don’t eat your chocolate, just, just break it in
half.
Just as awesome, 0 calories.
Now that we that we know all that, let’s head back to the interview.
After the melanger machine, after 24 hours, the chocolate gonna be very warm.
Between 45 and 50 degrees.
To activate the beta crystals, you have to use the marble stone to make the tempering step.
On the marble stone, the chocolate should be between 25 and 28 degrees coldest.
Then you can make bars, whatever you want.
Cool! Very cool. But wait a sec, what if we get something wrong?
What if we don’t temper the chocolate perfectly?
I know someone.
Hey, Inés?
>> INES: Hey Alex!
What’s up?
>> ALEX: What happens if we get another crystal structure of chocolate, say 1-4 or 6, even?
>> INES: Ahh good question!
If you temper at a different a temperature, it will result in the chocolate having a different
crystal formation and that means your chocolate isn’t shiny, or worse.
Forms 1 and 2, which is obtained by rapid cooling as opposed to really gradual cooling
for form 5, don’t have any snap, they just crumble and are super messy.
Forms 3 and 4 are a little bit better, but still no good snap.
Finally, form 6, which you can’t actually get from tampering but you can only get if
you encounter old chocolate (like, really old 4 month old chocolate) is way too firm,
and just no longer good.
Also note that all of these other forms contain some amount of chocolate blooms.
Have you ever looked at old chocolate and wondered what that weird whitey stuff was?
That stuff is chocolate blooms, which either comes from changes in the chocolate’s fat
or the chocolate's sugar collecting moisture.
It’s safe to eat, but it just doesn’t taste as good as the amazingness that is that
beta crystal chocolate.
That was interesting.
It really drew my curiosity.
Drew curiosity.
Draw curiosity.
Check out Ines’s channel.
Huh, that’s some pretty sweet science.
Man, that was the best pun I’ve ever made, natural, funny,
duh, you know what, takes us out, past me.
>> ALEX (in Machu Picchu): And that is why chocolate is shiny. Thanks for watching, DFTBA, and explore on.
>> TAMATOA (signing): I'll never hide, I can't, I'm too shiny!!
This is the first of a series of videos I made when I went to Peru, so stick around
for more in the upcoming weeks and months.
Thank you to the ChocoMuseo, thank you to this person for making fan, and thank you
to Ines from Draw Curiosity for coming on the show.
Check out her channel, it is really amazing.
Also thank you to my all patrons, especially Dave, Emma, Joost, Kevin, Nick, and Ryan.
You know, it’s patrons like those people and all of you who support me over at patreon.com/technicality
that allows me to do stuff like buying those beans and nibs and powder so I can show you
the science hands-on.
If you think that added to your Technicality experience, I would greatly appreciate it
if you considered supporting me over there.
Thank you so much!
See ya next time.