Low fat chocolate in sight
If you’re a chocolate lover like me, you’ll understand the deep satisfaction in devouring a chocolate bar when you crave one above anything else. But the side effects, one being its high levels of fat – typically 40-60% – can put some people off.
However, researchers at Temple University in the US have found a way to use an electric field to reduce fat in liquid chocolate during the manufacturing process.
Although chocolate makers and scientists have been searching for a way to lower the fat for decades, there has been little success.
Lead study author, Rongjia Tao, professor of physics at Temple University, believes the problem can be traced to chocolate in its liquid state, the form at which all manufacturing is done.
When fat is removed from liquid chocolate, its viscosity, or consistency, changes and the chocolate blocks the pipeline as it travels through. Tao and his team found that by applying an electric field they could reduce the viscosity enough to reduce the fat, as well as increase the density of the particles to maintain proper flow of chocolate through the manufacturing process.
The key, they say, was applying the electric field in the same direction as the flow of the chocolate. Traditionally, electrorheology (ER) – the practice of using electric fields on liquids – works perpendicularly to the liquid flow direction.
ER works by changing the alignment of the particles in a liquid using electric fields. In the study, ER aggregated the cocoa solid particles into short chains, which allowed the team to lower the viscosity and reduce the fat, but maintain the flow.
Using their own device to test the theory, the scientists were able to reduce the fat on several different brands of chocolate by 20%. And Tao claims the low fat chocolate is tasty and even has a slightly stronger cocoa flavour.
So low fat chocolate could be in sight sooner than we think.
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