Researchers at ETH Zurich have teamed up with the food industry to produce a whole-fruit variety of chocolate.
* ETH researchers have developed a type of chocolate that is more sustainable and nutritious than conventional varieties.
* Cocoa-fruit chocolate uses cocoa fruit jelly as a replacement for powdered sugar, reducing the sugar content and increasing the product’s nutritional value.
* This new chocolate recipe also has the potential to diversify the income sources of small farmers.
Cocoa fruit contains additional valuable ingredients that have been underutilized until now. Researchers at ETH Zurich have joined forces with the chocolate industry to investigate the potential for making maximum use of the cocoa fruit, which would increase the profitability of cocoa cultivation while making chocolate a healthier indulgence. As part of an Innosuisse project, a research team led by emeritus ETH professor Erich Windhab worked together with start-up Koa, which is dedicated to sustainable cocoa fruit cultivation, and Swiss chocolate manufacturer Felchlin to develop a recipe for cocoa-fruit chocolate.
Finding the perfect recipe
Kim Mishra, main author of the Nature Food study [Valorization of cocoa pod side streams improves nutritional and sustainability aspects of chocolate] , says that the cocoa fruit is similar to the honeydew melon: “These fruits have similar structures. Both have a hard outer shell that reveals the flesh of the fruit when cut open, as well as the cocoa beans or melon seeds and pulp in the interior.” Conventional chocolate only makes use of the beans, but the researchers were able to use the flesh and parts of the fruit shell – or the endocarp, to use the field-specific term – for their cocoa-fruit chocolate recipe. They process it into powder and mix it with part of the pulp to form cocoa gel. This gel substance is extremely sweet and can replace the added powdered sugar that is normally part of the chocolate experience.
How Does it Taste?
Trained panellists from the Bern University of Applied Sciences taste-tested pieces of chocolate weighing 5 grams each, with some containing various amounts of powdered sugar and others containing the new variety sweetened with cocoa gel. “This allowed us to empirically determine the sweetness of our recipe as expressed in the equivalent amount of powdered sugar,” says Mishra.
Healthy, sustainable and good for farmers
By using cocoa gel as a sweetener, cocoa-fruit chocolate boasts a higher fibre content than your average European dark chocolate (15 grams versus 12 grams per 100 grams). It also contains only 23 grams of saturated fat as opposed to the usual 33 grams. This means that ETH researchers were able to increase the fibre content by around 20 percent while reducing the saturated fat percentage by around 30 percent.
Small-scale farmers can diversify their product offerings and increase their income if other components of the cocoa fruit can be marketed for chocolate production instead of just the beans. And if most of the fruit can be used to produce cocoa-fruit chocolate, only the shell remains, which is traditionally used as fuel or composting material. “This means that farmers can not only sell the beans, but also dry out the juice from the pulp and the endocarp, grind it into powder and sell that as well,” explains Mishra. “This would allow them to generate income from three value-creation streams. And more value creation for the cocoa fruit makes it more sustainable.”
This doesn’t mean that cocoa-fruit chocolate will be hitting grocery store shelves anytime soon, however. “Although we’ve shown that our chocolate is attractive and has a comparable sensory experience to normal chocolate, the entire value creation chain will need to be adapted, starting with the cocoa farmers, who will require drying facilities,” says Mishra.
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This is just another effort to wring more profits. It will likely taste far worse. Most food these days taste terrible to me. I can hardly eat chicken anymore which I used to love. I don’t know what they’ve done with it, but it makes me gag. Bread taste worse. I remember, way back, when I was a kid wonder bread, Colonial bread, etc. it tasted great. Now it tastes like it has a little wheat and a lot of cardboard. It’s awful. Most food is like this now. I ate an orange the other day, and it was sour like a lemon. I think the orange was bred for packing, not tasting.
Another failure is soup in a can. I don’t know what they’ve done with it, but’s not good. Just what the hell are they doing with the food? Most of the time whatever you get has so much salt and “spices”, if you can call them that, to hide whatever hideous taste the food has. It’s really sad and depressing.
I think, possibly, that this trend to slather everything in seed oil is one of the problems. Lard is your friend. Seed oils rot, fast. Maybe that’s it.
It’s sad that with all the genetic engineering tools we have, the best they can do is make plants that can withstand dumping weedkillers on them.
There’s only one reason I’m addicted to chocolate. Taste
“Trained panelists from the Bern University of Applied Sciences taste-tested pieces of chocolate weighing 5 grams each, with some containing various amounts of powdered sugar and others containing the new variety sweetened with cocoa gel. “This allowed us to empirically determine the sweetness of our recipe as expressed in the equivalent amount of powdered sugar,” says Mishra.”
I notice that the taste testing seems to have been exclusively dedicated to comparing sweetness. Nothing about which sort of chocolate the tasters thought tasted better. People don’t typically eat chocolate to have a ‘sustainable’ diet, or for the nutritional qualities. They eat it purely for the taste. Outside of maybe a few days around Easter and perhaps Halloween, for children, chocolate doesn’t comprise a large enough percentage of most people’s diets for it’s fiber content to be important.
For all I know this stuff is delicious. But it’s conspicuous that they’re not saying that it tastes as good as regular chocolate. Really conspicuous, if you’re used to reading this sort of thing.
Don’t get me wrong: I might like it, and I’d love to at least try it. I’m just saying that, read critically, this doesn’t actually sound all that promising.
The virtuous fraction of cocoa beans is in the cocoa powder. The fat is not particularly beneficial but it makes fine suppositories.