Chocolate Bloom

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Chocolate is made of cocoa butter, cocoa solids, and other ingredients that have been mixed together.    Can you take them apart?

Chocolate after several weeks in a warm car
What you need:
  • Chocolate candy (dark works better)
  • Heat
What to do:
  1. Heat your chocolate in a sunny windowsill, with a hair dryer, in a microwave, or in a low oven, until it starts to melt.  (Chocolate melts fast--if it doesn't look melted, poke it to check.)
  2. Let it cool overnight or in the refrigerator.
  3. Repeat these steps until you see light brown spots or streaks.  (This may take several heating attempts.)
What's happening:
When the chocolate heats and cools, some of the fat pushes out past the solid particles and forms into white crystals.  This causes the light spots and streaks, which are known as chocolate bloom.*



*See Becket, S. T.  The Science of Chocolate, 2nd Edition.  The Royal Society of Chemistry: Cambridge, UK. 2008, pg 103, 109, 116-117

From the book Candy Experiments by Loralee Leavitt

8 comments:

  1. Does it still taste good after you did all this?

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    Replies
    1. I dont know.. Try it out and then eat it.

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    2. This chocolate bar would have tasted fine. One that's bloomed even more might have a crumbly texture. But all the good ingredients are still in there--the cocoa butter, the cocoa powder, and the sugar--they have just separated a little.

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  2. The texture can get grainy and crumbly if the chocolate has separated and bloomed a lot, such as in the photo above. If it's just slight bloom, such as a few small streaks along the edge, it tastes fine. Chocolate makers assure their eaters that bloomed chocolate is still perfectly edible.

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  3. You should try something with chocolate and gum. I remember when I was little and I tried to eat them both at the same time the gum would stop sticking together and become kind of grainy. I would be interested in knowing why it does that.

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  4. Sarah, that sounds really interesting. Offhand, I would guess that the gum stopped sticking together because the cocoa butter or fat in the chocolate coated the gum particles so that they no longer stuck to each other. We may have to try it here in the candy kitchen, though I'm not sure I'd want to eat it myself!

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  5. If I remember correctly, I have read that the effect on chewing gum is mostly from the lecithin in chocolate. I tried to look it up but I didn't find anything about this specific interaction; however, lecithin is used as a release agent and emulsifier, which should have the effect of "unsticking" the gum.

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