By Dr. Luke Tolley, PhD in Chemistry (North Carolina) and former professor, Southern Illinois University
In my opinion, chocolate is one of the most amazing things on the planet. It deserves its Latin name meaning “food of the gods”, which seems very appropriate. However, the amazing taste and texture bring with them a few challenges. Two primary ones are the cost of real chocolate and the challenge of tempering the cocoa butter to get that perfect chocolate texture. Tempering is the process of getting the cocoa butter to crystalize correctly and I’ll devote another whole post to that because it’s worth discussing. These days it’s common to find machines that can temper chocolate automatically, so companies are mainly worried about the cost of real chocolate.
Fake Chocolate
Since people like chocolate, for many years food producers have looked for ways to make chocolate cheaper. This has led to many products that look like they use chocolate, but if you pay attention they are labeled as ‘chocolatey’ or they use the word ‘fudge’. They don’t use the word ‘chocolate’. The reason why is that chocolate has a specific legal definition and the stuff that they are using doesn’t meet it. Instead they use a brown substance whose flavor is inspired by chocolate and call it fudge or chocolatey, hoping that you don’t notice.
So what is this fake chocolate that they use? The main difference is primarily in the fat that they use. As I mentioned, real chocolate has cocoa butter as its main fat. Cocoa butter is unusual as a fat because at room temperature it’s quite hard, but it melts at just below body temperature to a thin liquid. This is why you can get the good snap of a well-tempered chocolate bar, and yet it will still melt beautifully in the mouth. Most fats start softer and melt gradually. This means that if you used one of them to try to replace cocoa butter, you would have a bar that doesn’t have that snap and wouldn’t melt in your mouth the right way. Often the melting point isn’t right, so you get that waxy feel in your mouth when you eat them.
Fractionated Palm Oil
Companies that make compound coatings (one of the generic terms for fake chocolate), have spent lots of time and money to try to find a replacement for cocoa butter. One of the ones that they use these days is fractionated palm oil. Sounds delicious, right? Let me explain what it is. Palm oils are oils that you get from palm trees – obvious, right? Right away you can guess one of the problems that palm oils cause. Palm trees like to grow in rainforest or jungle conditions, so often the natural forest is removed and replaced with a palm oil plantation. As the use of palm oils increases, this deforestation accelerates. For this and other reasons many people have some ethical concerns about the growing use of palm oils.
Let’s now look at the 'fractionated' part of the name. There are different parts of the palm trees that you can get oil from, but none of it is solid enough and has the right melting characteristics to replace cocoa butter. Since these oils have several different types of fat molecules in them, scientists have found ways to separate the fat into batches based on which fat molecule they have. These batches are called fractions, so fractionated oils are where they take a natural oil and separate it into its components. Each of these components has different chemical properties and it turns out that one fraction has similar properties to cocoa butter. Not quite the same, but close enough for fake chocolate.
Conclusion
The fractionated palm kernel oil is cheaper than cocoa butter, so they add this and other compounds to enhance the chocolate flavor and end up with a compound coating. For these reasons, compound coatings are easier to work with and much cheaper than real chocolate, though not nearly as nice to eat. However, I must admit that most other protein bars still wouldn’t be great even if they used real chocolate, but it would make them better.
As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of fake chocolate. In my mind, the extra cost and effort of real chocolate are totally worth it to get the tasting experience that can’t be achieved any other way. This is one of the many reasons that the Blue Unicorn bar is the best protein bar on the market.
By Dr. Luke Tolley, PhD in Chemistry (North Carolina) and former professor, Southern Illinois University
In my opinion, chocolate is one of the most amazing things on the planet. It deserves its Latin name meaning “food of the gods”, which seems very appropriate. However, the amazing taste and texture bring with them a few challenges. Two primary ones are the cost of real chocolate and the challenge of tempering the cocoa butter to get that perfect chocolate texture. Tempering is the process of getting the cocoa butter to crystalize correctly and I’ll devote another whole post to that because it’s worth discussing. These days it’s common to find machines that can temper chocolate automatically, so companies are mainly worried about the cost of real chocolate.
Identifying Fake Chocolate
Since people like chocolate, for many years food producers have looked for ways to make chocolate cheaper. This has led to many products that look like they use chocolate, but if you pay attention they are labeled as ‘chocolatey’ or they use the word ‘fudge’. They don’t use the word ‘chocolate’. The reason why is that chocolate has a specific legal definition and the stuff that they are using doesn’t meet it. Instead they use a brown substance whose flavor is inspired by chocolate and call it fudge or chocolatey, hoping that you don’t notice.
So what is this fake chocolate that they use? The main difference is primarily in the fat that they use. As I mentioned, real chocolate has cocoa butter as its main fat. Cocoa butter is unusual as a fat because at room temperature it’s quite hard, but it melts at just below body temperature to a thin liquid. This is why you can get the good snap of a well-tempered chocolate bar, and yet it will still melt beautifully in the mouth. Most fats start softer and melt gradually. This means that if you used one of them to try to replace cocoa butter, you would have a bar that doesn’t have that snap and wouldn’t melt in your mouth the right way. Often the melting point isn’t right, so you get that waxy feel in your mouth when you eat them.
Fractionated Palm Oil
Companies that make compound coatings (one of the generic terms for fake chocolate), have spent lots of time and money to try to find a replacement for cocoa butter. One of the ones that they use these days is fractionated palm oil. Sounds delicious, right? Let me explain what it is. Palm oils are oils that you get from palm trees – obvious, right? Right away you can guess one of the problems that palm oils cause. Palm trees like to grow in rainforest or jungle conditions, so often the natural forest is removed and replaced with a palm oil plantation. As the use of palm oils increases, this deforestation accelerates. For this and other reasons many people have some ethical concerns about the growing use of palm oils.
Let’s now look at the 'fractionated' part of the name. There are different parts of the palm trees that you can get oil from, but none of it is solid enough and has the right melting characteristics to replace cocoa butter. Since these oils have several different types of fat molecules in them, scientists have found ways to separate the fat into batches based on which fat molecule they have. These batches are called fractions, so fractionated oils are where they take a natural oil and separate it into its components. Each of these components has different chemical properties and it turns out that one fraction has similar properties to cocoa butter. Not quite the same, but close enough for fake chocolate.
Conclusion
The fractionated palm kernel oil is cheaper than cocoa butter, so they add this and other compounds to enhance the chocolate flavor and end up with a compound coating. For these reasons, compound coatings are easier to work with and much cheaper than real chocolate, though not nearly as nice to eat. However, I must admit that most other protein bars still wouldn’t be great even if they used real chocolate, but it would make them better.
As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of fake chocolate. In my mind, the extra cost and effort of real chocolate are totally worth it to get the tasting experience that can’t be achieved any other way. This is one of the many reasons that the Blue Unicorn bar is the best protein bar on the market.
