Video: Lecithin: Why you need it in chocolate making. Science explained.
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Video Transcript:
I still remembered when I made chocolate for the first time, I chose to make it ” with cocoa butter. And the recipe always says “dissolve sugar in the melted cocoa butter”, ” but here is a problem. Sugar does not dissolve in oil. And I don’t know why you said that recipe, why you ask me to do something that cannot be accomplished? ” As a result, the finished products always have “two layers”, and the lower layer is ” always sweeter than the upper layer. Then one day I tried another recipe calling for lecithin, and it perfectly solved this problem. The question is, why? Let’s find out with PAA.
Hi, I am Shao Chieh Lo, welcome to what people also ask, where I search for something seemingly obvious and share with you some of its PAA, aka People Also Ask, which is a feature telling you what other people are searching on Google that relates to your query. Today’s keyword is Lecithin, and specifically, the chocolate-making implementation of lecithin.
What is lecithin?
So I think it’s a good idea to talk about what is lecithin first. So what is lecithin? What many people don’t know is that lecithin is not a specific compound but a collective noun. According to the definition of lecithin in the book “Lecithin: Source, Manufacturing, and Use” published by the American Oil Chemists’ Society in 1989. Lecithin is any group of yellow-brownish fatty substances occurring in animal and plant tissues that are amphiphilic which means they attract both water and fatty substances, and so are both hydrophilic and lipophilic, and are used for smoothing food textures, emulsifying and homogenizing liquid mixtures. Lecithins are mixtures of glycerophospholipids including a bunch of hard-to-pronounce stuff.
Do you need lecithin to make chocolate?
I know most of you don’t actually care about this, so let’s move on to our next PAA: Do you need lecithin to make chocolate? ” Google’s auto-generated answer is linked to an article titled “Soy Lecithin In Chocolate: Why Is It So Controversial?” published by The Chocolate Journalist which appears to be a website of a journalist who covers the news and trends in the chocolate industry.
According to this article, chocolate makers usually use lecithin to thin down their chocolate mixture to make it more workable. And 0.5% of lecithin can thin down the chocolate to the same degree as a mixture added an additional 3.0% or 4.0% additional cocoa butter. But this article does not answer my ” question regarding how lecithin helps me solve the “layered chocolate problem”.
But I found two pieces of research that can answer this question. A study published in the journal Food hydrocolloids in 2005 observed the dispersion of sugar in oily solvents such as cocoa butter or soybean oil, with and without emulsifiers such as lecithin, and found that emulsifiers can effectively reduce the volume of sediment. This study believes that this phenomenon is due to the fact that surfactants such as lecithin reduce the strength of the attractive interactions between the sedimenting sugar particles. This theory is supported by another study published in the journal Colloids and Surfaces in 2013. The study added powdered sugar to soybean oil and MCT oil and observe the mixture using atomic force microscopy and found that lecithin indeed will reduce adhesion between sugar particles dispersed in oil. So after reading these two pieces of research I realized, when you are making chocolate, your goal is not to dissolve sugar in cocoa butter, because I promise you, you won’t make it happen. Your goal is to disperse the sugar as evenly in the mixture as possible and make it colloids. And surfactants like lecithin can definitely help here. Another study published in the Journal of Food Engineering in 2011 discovered another lesser-known effect of lecithin on chocolate: it can speed up the cocoa butter crystallization process and result in a more homogenous microstructure for seeded chocolate. As to what is crystallization and seeding, I recommend watching another two videos by kitchen matter, I will put the links in the description.
Can pectin replace lecithin?
So what if you don’t want to use lecithin for some reason? Let’s talk about our next PAA: Can pectin replace lecithin? Google’s automatic generated answer linked to a research titled”okra pectin as lecithin substitute in chocolate” published in 2019 in Journal Scientific African. According to this research, you probably can use okra pectin instead! In this research, they use different proportions of okra pectin in place of lecithin in the milk chocolate-making process and found that all the chocolate samples from the various formulations had similar sensory properties as well as textural parameters (aka hardness, cohesiveness, adhesiveness, springiness, and chewiness), which suggests that it is possible to use okra pectin as an emulsifier to produce milk chocolate that is acceptable to consumers. Okay, let’s recap. Today we learned what is lecithin, why you need lecithin in the chocolate-making process, and its scientific explanation and you might be able to use pectin in place of lecithin in the milk chocolate-making process. If you made it to the end of the video, chances are that you enjoy learning what people also ask on Google. But let’s face it, reading PAA yourself will be a pain. So here’s the deal, I will do the reading for you and upload a video compiling some fun PAAs once a week, all you have to do is to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon so you won’t miss any PAA report that I compile. So just do it right now. Bye!