Physics of Chocolate

Daniel and Jorge talk about the deep but tenuous connection between physics and chocolate.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, we all know you like chocolate, but is
that a personal or a professional interest?

Speaker 2 (00:13):
You know, I don't think I know where to draw
the line anymore.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
I mean between your personal and professional interests.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Sometimes it's all just a big mush.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Well, you're paid to do physics, but are you paid
to eat chocolate?

Speaker 3 (00:26):
No?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I still have to pay for my own chocolate. It's
not yet stocked in the department office supply. I mean,
I've checked.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
So chocolate is personal, Lin, It's not necessary to eat
it to do physics.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
You know, this is an excellent question, and I'm going
to raise that with my department chair because I think
it is essential.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
You're going to get a chocolate chair for your office.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
I want my chair dipped in chocolate.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
There you go, that's going to be great on your pants.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Who wears pants in their office?

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Heyersonal choice man, not a professional one unless they're in
a certain profession.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
See, the line can be fuzzy.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Hi, I'm for him, a cartoonist and the author of
Oliver's Great Big Universe.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
at UC Irvine, and I definitely consume chocolate to do
physics really.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Like, before you sit down to do any math or
work out any physics scenarios or experiments, you have to
eat a bar of chocolate.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
No, it's not as tightly corelated as like drinking coffee
to think hard. But you know, I consume a fair
amount of chocolate every week, and I do a fair
amount of physics every week, and so there's definitely some
in out relationship there.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
I see there's a correlation, but who knows what the causation.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Is who it could be the physics leads to chocolate
instead of chocolate leads to physics, Like.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
The physics is financing your chocolate addiction.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
That's definitely true, Yes, that in this podcast.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
In which we invite you along on an exploration of
everything in the universe. The black holes, the quantum particles,
the mysterious chocolate habits of physics professors. Everything out there
is up for understanding and therefore grist for explanation.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
That's right, because it is a delicious, silky smooth universe
out there, full of mysteries, flavors, and nuances that are
still up for debit and still up for exploration and
asking questions.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
And some of the most amazing and mysterious experiences in
our lives do come down to the microscopic science, the
physics or even gasp, the chemistry of your food determines
what it feels like and what it tastes like in
your mouth.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
That's right. Science is all around us in the physics
of our presence here on the planet. There's chemistry and
the foods we eat, and there's psychology in things like
chocolate addiction.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Chocolate addiction what I could stop any time?

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Sure you can, Dan, Yeah, sure, that's what they all say.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
I mean, I'm not going to prove it, but I
know I could.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
You're not gonna like it, but you could. You're saying
like you're gonna go into withdrawl and get the shakes,
but uh, you can still do it exactly.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
And regular listeners of the podcast might have picked up
on the fact that we're often making jokes about chocolate,
connecting chocolate with physics, connecting physics with chocolate. But I'm
a believer that there's more than just a few jokes
to be had here, that there is a deep connection
between physics and chocolate.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
M isn't there a graph you can find online of
like number of Nobel prizes per country versus amount of
chocolate consumed.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yes, indeed, there is an amazing correlation between the Nobel
prizes per capita and the pounds of dark chocolate consumed
per capita. It's really pretty tight. Switzerland is definitely in
the upper edge of both of those categories.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
But of course I could just be a coincidence, right,
because the Swiss love their chocolate, and the Swiss are
the ones that issued the mobile price.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
No, those those are the Swedes. Man the Swedes, oh
the sweeze, Oh boy, whoops? But close, I guess kind of.
They're both European.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, there you go, Central Europe.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
I think the Swedes are also up there. So maybe
it's a Swedish Swiss cabal that's behind all of it.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Well, the question then, is is it a correlation or
a causation and in which direction is the causation?

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Right?

Speaker 4 (04:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Or maybe there another confounding factor that fuels them both.
Who knows? One of the deep mysteries of the universe.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Sounds like you're just throwing your hands up in the air. Daniel, Here,
I've embracing the mystery. Should need you apply for a
grant to study this or something?

Speaker 2 (04:44):
I think I'm going to go have some chocolate and
think deeply about it.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, there you go, But how are you going to
pay for that chocolate?

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Okay, I'm applying for a grant? Yeah, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Applied to the National Snack Foundation the NSF. But yeah,
like you said, there is a chemistry everywhere and physics
within chemistry all around us, even in the foods we eat.
So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the physics
of chocolate.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
There's definitely a physics of chocolate in the experience of
eating it, but chocolate also plays other outsized roles in physics.
We use chocolate for analogies all the time. Phyes this.
Definitely eat a lot of chocolate. You can actually even
use chocolate to do physics experiments.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Now, hold on, I feel like you just made a
statement there, which is that all physicists eat a lot
of chocolate. Is that just based on your experiment of
one with yourself, or is there really like a culture
of chocolate within the physics world.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
You know, I anticipated you challenging me on this, and
so I did a bit of research. I was able
to dig up how much Americans eat in terms of
chocolate per week. On average, Americans eat three chocolate bars
per week, spending one hundred and twenty billion dollars a
year year on this stuff. But I wasn't able to
find any data on how much chocolate physicists consume. I mean,

(06:06):
I have my own observations. I know the physicists or
lovers of coffee and coffee chocolate often connected, and people
are often having little squares of chocolate when they sit
there coffee. But yes, I will admit at this point
it's basically anecdotal.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
I see. So when you said I did some research,
you mean you actually didn't do any research.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
I mean I ate some chocolate and I thought about it.
That's research.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, that's what I mean. Did some research with an
end of one, like one data point.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
I watched people in my department eating chocolate. That's end
of like five or ten.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Well, you would have to do a controlled experiment like
good at the math department, go to the chemistry department,
go to the sociology department, and then measure the chocolate
consumption per professor.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, you just outlined my proposal to the National Snack Foundation.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, there you go. Do I get to be a
co author and thus a recipient of the money?

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah? Sure, absolutely. If I get money from the National
Snack Foundation, we'll share it for.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
This study, all right, But I don't have to use
it buy chocolate to egg or what if I use
it to buy white chocolate, thus canceling out?

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Oh god. You know, they have pretty strict controls on
how you spend government money. So as long as you
can stand before Congress and defend that as a valid
way to spend public funds, then hey, let's do it.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, well I hear the National Snack
Foundation gets into trouble all the time with that. But yeah,
it's interesting to think about. You know, everything that we
eat basically has chemistry and does physics in it. Right,
there's science and then everything we do and everything we
are and everything we put down our stomachs and everything
that comes out the other head.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
That's right, the chocolate that goes in in the dark,
matter that comes out.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
Well, you mentioned that there's some experiments you can do
with chocolate. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 2 (07:48):
This is sort of famous at home measurement of the
speed of light that you can do using a bar
of chocolate. You take a bar of chocolate and you
put it in the microwave, and you'll notice that certain
spots on it faster than others. Those are because of
the microwaves, which are actually just invisible light waves are
heating some parts of the chocolate more than others because

(08:09):
of the wave like nature of light. So you can
use that to measure the wavelength of the light and
then knowing the frequency already, you can derive the speed
of light. So you can kind of measure the speed
of light using chocolate and a microwave.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Wait, what is this like a real experiment you can do.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
This is a real experiment you can do. You can
google it and find instructions online. You put the microwave
in the chocolate and you'll notice some melty spots here
and there. Measure the distance between them, and you get
basically the wavelength of the microwaves. You can convert that
into the speed of light.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
But do you have to disable the rotating table?

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, exactly, you can't let it rotate.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
And thankfully you don't need a chocolate for these you
can use butter or maybe wax.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Right, No, you need to do chocolate. Oh, you're absolutely right.
You don't need chocolate. It's just kind of fun.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
You just can do it chocolate.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Well, at the end of the chocolate version experiment, you
have a nice, warm, melti bar of chocolate. The end
of the wax version, you don't have any snacks.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Mm, but you only have a few warm pools of chocolate.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, that's exactly right.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
You have a pattern of melted chocolate. All right, Well,
what are we doing in this episode? We're talking about
the physics of chocolate, the signs behind chocolate.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
We're going to do both. We are going to talk
to an ex physicist who has done a deep dive
on the process of chocolate, reading research papers and going
from dirt to bar, growing his own chocolate pods and
making his own chocolate bar in his lab, and also
talk to experts in commercial production of chocolate. What are

(09:41):
the tricky bits of the process, what's hard about making
an eminem taste the same all the world around? And
why does Hershey's have that particular kind of flavor?

Speaker 3 (09:50):
Mmm?

Speaker 1 (09:51):
Interesting? All right, Well, let's take a big dip into
this fondue of Chocolate Physics, starting with Daniel's interview with
ex physicist Seamus Likely.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Seamus grew up in New Mexico as I did, has
a PhD in particle physics like I do, worked at
Formulab just like I did, and there are stories diverge.
He went off into an industry where he created the Xbox,
and more recently he's been well known online for scraping
the insides of ancient Egyptian vessels to cultivate yeast and

(10:23):
bake ancient bread. Okay, so then it's my great pleasure
to welcome the podcast the Infamous, the one and only
Seamus Blackly. Seamus, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks
for having me man. You know, I wanted to give
an introduction to the listeners, had an idea of who
we were talking to here, but it was just such
an overwhelming process to try to sketch your background. It's

(10:45):
really incredible. So can you give us like a brief
summary of how you got to here today to a
place where we're talking about nerding out about chocolate details.

Speaker 5 (10:55):
You know, people always say that now when they're talking
to me or trying to introduce me at things and
It's confusing to me because from my standpoint, you know,
I'm bored all the time, and so none of this
seems very interesting to.

Speaker 4 (11:11):
Me at all.

Speaker 5 (11:12):
But perhaps that's why I have had the good luck
to do all sorts of different things, because I guess
I get bored very easily, and I'm very interested in
how everything works. But the long and short of it,
and I think specifically from the standpoint of you know,
the most important thing we share in common, which is physics,

(11:35):
is that I grew up in New Mexico. I thought
I was going to be a musician, and at some
point I realized that all of the jazz piano guys,
which is what I was, who were really respected, who

(11:57):
played the best, were like still living with their mothers
when they were in their forties.

Speaker 4 (12:03):
And that was cool.

Speaker 5 (12:04):
I mean, there were really amazing people, and I don't
mean to cast dispersions on them, but I realized that
I couldn't do that, and so I had to figure
out something else to do. And it turned out at
that point I was an undergraduate and I had burned
through two years, and I had to find something else
that I could study that might make me some money.
And I guess the idea that physics would be a

(12:27):
career that would make you money. I mean, yeah, sure,
but probably more than jazz piano at the time. And well,
the only majors available you could do in two years
without some kind of maze of prerequisites that would be
impossible were basically physics and math at the time, and
the physics department at Tufts I went to school was

(12:50):
filled with all of these really cool guys doing experimental
hyenergy physics and phenomenologists and a couple of theorists. And
they were all like Vietnam draft who went into physics
to go to graduate school and.

Speaker 4 (13:02):
Not go to Vietnam.

Speaker 5 (13:03):
And they were, you know, like touching the face of
God to be frank, I mean, they were trying to
understand the fundamental nature of the universe. And in my mind,
the work felt the same as jazz, and I just
kind of stepped through that door and was suddenly, you know,

(13:24):
at formula.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
It's fascinating to me that you grew up in northern
New Mexico near two national labs, but didn't really discover
your passion for physics until you left and went to Boston.

Speaker 5 (13:35):
Well, yeah, and I had interestingly you know, in high
school has really focused on music and you know, musical
theater and all this stuff. So yeah, and I think
that the nature of New Mexico as being such an
incredibly bizarre, fascinating, beautiful, creative and technical place was hot

(14:00):
and all of this for me in any case, So
I go to Framer Lab and you know, I'm setting
up postdocs, and I go to graduate school and I
find something in the Magnet Accelerator Physics group for the
super Condutting SuperCollider that looks great. And then Congress cancels

(14:20):
the SuperCollider, and there's a big politics thing around the
top Quark, and all these things sort of combined together
to cause me to be very unhappy, and so I
bailed out and went and took a job designing airplanes
that didn't quite materialize. So I had a temporary job

(14:43):
doing a thing nobody had ever heard of before, which
was writing physics for video games, which was not even
a thing. And suddenly I was in the video game business,
and you know, it was so exciting and wonderful to
be around, work with the people and contributing to the

(15:03):
beginnings of what is now you know, video games like
three dimensional video games and three D rendering. Yeah, and
you know, like my variable names and the stuff are
still used in all those engines because I was just
around at the right time, like a guy looking for
the men's room, right who walks in the wrong room,
and then that's where I was.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
And well certainly right place, right time, with the right
skills as well.

Speaker 5 (15:28):
I mean, it was still fairly awkward to tell people
you worked in video games, because it hadn't occurred to
most people yet that video games were made by people.
I mean, it sounds odd, but it's not like it
is now. So so I did that for a long
time and that led to me trying to make a

(15:50):
big magnum opus game at a new company called DreamWorks,
where I was like, you know, the eightieth employee or something,
and you know, just biting off more and I could
chew and failing at that, you know, and I worked
for Steven Spielberg and I knew all these guys, and again,
you know, the typical for me, I was just sort
of walking through this place thinking, wow, okay, of course

(16:12):
everybody hangs out with Steven Spielberg, and it wasn't really
you know, the work you're doing this is such a
physicist thing, like the work you're doing is so hard
that everything else kind of seems peripheral and it's not
like you're sleepwalking. But I know it's really aggravating for
people around you because they don't see the thing in

(16:33):
your mind that you're working on. They don't see the
kind of you know, infinite landscape of thought that you
have going on.

Speaker 4 (16:41):
All the time.

Speaker 5 (16:41):
So you just seem like a space kit it and
you're not paying attention. But it's quite the opposite, right,
So that's what Games was like then, because we were
figuring out, hey, what is a renderer? Like what like,
how do you how would you what when you go
through a door? How do you deal with that in memory?
Because we have four megabytes and you know this kind
of stuff. And anyway, my big game there failed because

(17:03):
I was, you know, working with a bunch of movie
people who didn't get it, and I was, you know,
twenty seven or twenty eight or something, and I feel
like I probably wasn't even toilet trained, you know, I
was really so young. And that huge failure led to
me going to try to hide out at Microsoft because
I had met Bill Gates again. Sleepwalking through all this stuff.
And he had said, based on some of the physics

(17:24):
demos that he saw that we were doing, and you know,
locomotion physics that we'd done with dinosaurs and humans and
all this, that I should come work at Microsoft someday.
And so I sort of sheepishly mailed him, and then
I ended up working at Microsoft. And then couldn't help
myself when I realized that Microsoft could you know, could

(17:47):
make a game console that could beat Sony and et cetera,
et cetera. So I just keep on, you know, looking
at seeing interesting stuff to work on, and I, for
some reason, don't have the common sense that most people
have about well that's really stupid. You're gonna lose your house.

(18:07):
I just go ahead and do it anyway. So there
you go. And so now we end up with you know,
me doing you know, another secret project that I can't
tell you about right now, and and and a lot
of hobby.

Speaker 4 (18:22):
Projects that I talk about.

Speaker 5 (18:23):
A lot, like the ancient Egyptian bakery, which I believe
it or not, you know, we're now I think going to.

Speaker 4 (18:31):
Build in Cairo, and this chocolate stuff.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
Well, you know, I talk a lot in the podcast
about teaching people to think like a physicist, you know,
which is not to use your common sense, but to
follow your curiosity and your intuition and try to make
sense of the world and to you know, think differently.
And I think that's something we definitely should cultivate. And
so maybe you're training as a physicist is what helped
you follow your curiosity and end up in all these
exciting adventures.

Speaker 5 (18:57):
This is I think probably universally true about all him
and endeavor has come from someone following that curiosity and
and doing as Penduleete says, you know, an amount of
work on something that most people would consider insane, right,
you know, he says, that's what magic is, right, Magic

(19:17):
is somebody working on something, you know, in a way
that most people will consider to be insane. But that's
truly what like everything, all human progress, like every story
you read about anything important, beautiful, world changing, you know,
always has an element of an individual or group of
individuals who are working on it despite all indications that

(19:39):
it's insane, and following that. And I think that within
physics we need more of that because sometimes you get
to see a secret, and you're not going to see
that secret unless you open yourself to being compelled to

(19:59):
just follow in that curiosity despite every practical concern And
it's weird because you are a physical being. You have
to have practical concerns. You have to eat, you have
to have relationships. You know, you don't want to have
like Fiman's second wife's divorce papers saying all he thinks
about is calculus. But also, I mean all I think

(20:24):
about is calculus. I mean that's like, it's just how
it is because sometimes you know, it turns up a
gold nugget, man, So that's so important. It's really, really,
really important. And I mean to get back around a
chocolate That's where the chocolate comes from, is the musing
of how strange is it that dirt can produce this

(20:49):
chocolate bar? And you know, could we do that? We
could try. Let's try. Let's see what it's like, because
it'll just be a thing we do in the background.
I will take years for the tree to let's just
see if we cannot kill the tree.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
But why chocolate specifically, I mean, were you're trying to
develop a useful skill so you can create something valuable
in the end times or do you think that's a
deep physics chocolate connection it's chocolate. What else do you need?
I mean, all right, so let's get to chocolate. Then
can you walk us through the process, because I know
you did a deep dive into the research of how
to go from dirt to bar. Walk us through every

(21:24):
stage of the process of how you grow this thing,
how you ferment it, how you roasted. What are all
the secrets there that humanity has slowly discovered over thousands
of years.

Speaker 5 (21:33):
It's impressive, kind of in the same vein as coffee.
And I was thinking about coffee because I did grow
coffee also years ago, and it's just so interesting that
we would, you know, cultivate these plants because they had
a stimulant in them, and everybody knew that a stimulant.
So it's like tea. You cultivate these plants and they

(21:55):
make these little red berries. I don't know if you've
ever seen coffee berries on a tree. And then you
harvest them when they're red, and then you throw away
the fruit and you keep the seed okay, fair enough,
and then you dry the seeds, and then you roast
the seeds, and then you grind the seeds, and then
you boil the seeds, and then you also throw the

(22:18):
seeds away and you drink the water. That's insane. Nobody
would think of that, And so there's some kind of
evolutionary process in there that's very lucky. And part of
what you wonder is if that is the optimal way
to enjoy the coffee bean or not, or if it's
merely habitual. And you know, there are many coffee traditions,

(22:40):
but they all basically follow that same extraction principle. And
it is a biological extraction, right, I mean, it's a
biology lab kind of a process, but the biology lab
process probably came from people understanding that type of extraction
and applying it elsewhere. So the question is how it
fits together, and that's a little bit of the motivation
or chocolate. So, as I said, in my lab, we

(23:03):
have space and temperature control and some humidity from a
water jetta, a machine that cuts difficult stuff using high
pressure water. It has a big water tank and so
there's always a kind of a humid environment around it.
So we had accidentally grown some plants around it just
for some cheer, or actually we had a contest to

(23:25):
see how big a tomato plant we could grow. And
in this environment, this little tomato ceiling in six or
seven months, you know, grew like twenty five feet to
the ceiling and was winding out onto the ceiling. So
we thought, all right, well, this is a great growing environment.
What's the most interesting thing we could grow? And you know,
chocolate is probably the weirdest and most interesting thing you

(23:47):
could grow, because I don't think intuitively, at least for me,
I didn't think about chocolate as being a plant, you know,
what is it as a petroleum product?

Speaker 4 (23:58):
Like what does it come from?

Speaker 5 (24:00):
And so we you know, got some seeds and planted
them and they sprouted, and then we had a few
years of you know, just happily, you know, figuring out
how to not kill them, and you know it had
to do with soil acidity and such, and there are
papers you can read. So we kind of, you know,
did the classic nerd thing, which is to look to

(24:20):
the literature. And it's kind of scant for for cacaw
and chocolate actually, And part of that is because the
industry could be kind of kind of secretive, like a
lot of industries. And part of it is because in
the places where cocaw grows, it's kind of weed like,
and so the idea of you know, nutrition of cacao

(24:43):
plants is you know, an absurd kind of a study,
given the fact that the chocolate industry is real problem
is like child slavery. So and the reason there's child
slavery is the plants grow around anywhere, and so the
economics are around harvesting and moving the product around, not

(25:03):
around optimizing for growth. Anyway, we're nerd, so we're optimizing
for growth. And we got these beautiful trees and they
started to flower, and we're thinking, all right, well, we
have no idea if these things are self fertile or not,
you know, and these are indoors, so we're not going
to introduce a bunch of you know, pollinators in here,
so let's hope. So we waited a really long time

(25:25):
and yeah, they're not self fertile. And we you know,
we have a day job too and other projects.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
So meaning that you're wondering if like one flower can
fertilize another flower, or if you need a whole separate
plant to have some basically cacao secs.

Speaker 5 (25:38):
We have microbiologists and other people with a background of
biology in our staff, so there was a time, you know,
there was some debate about this at lunchtime, and then
finally we looked up the literature and realized that not
only are they not self fertile, but they need to
be fertilized by trees that are preferably, you know, somewhat

(25:58):
genetically distant from themselves. And the preferred pollinator is a
certain kind of biting gnat that lives only in these
environments where the trees come from. And so that was
not good news. So we then started a program of
learning how to pollinate these things by hand.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
You couldn't just go on like cacou tinder and look
up a matching tree, you know, put them on a
date and to hope it works out.

Speaker 5 (26:25):
Unfortunately, that's not not there yet. But it's a good
business idea for your game, So go for that.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
That's my next side project.

Speaker 5 (26:33):
But you know, interestingly, if you if you if you
actually look up online, there's a there's not a lot
of information that's particularly helpful if you actually have trees
and you don't know what to do with them, because
everybody who has trees already knows what to do with them,
which is just leave them and their fruit appears. You know,
we feel like we're the only people in the world
who like have these trees without the pollinator around. Okay,

(26:53):
so we, you know, get out microscopes and the electron
microscope and we start looking at the in and the
different parts of the structures in the in the flowers.
We have three trees now because we know we need
genetic diversity. The flowers are slightly different. We identify the parts.
We tried different strategies and schedules for pollination, and we

(27:16):
start getting flowers that that will create fruit. We start
we get a little fruit and then the fruit falls off,
and we learn a little bit more about when to pollinate.
We learn a little bit more about about care and feeding,
and we get fruit that sticks. And now we have
a bunch of pods growing on trees, and we realize

(27:41):
we have another problem, which is that we have no
idea what to do next. You know, how do you
know when these things are ripe?

Speaker 4 (27:50):
What do you do?

Speaker 5 (27:52):
And so again, you know, you look to the internet
and there's really you know, there's a lot of information
that plenty of people take a tour of a of
a cacao arm and see the fermentation and the drawing
and all these things, and there are lots of videos
like you know, like travel promo videos or like you know,
Starbucks promotional type videos of like you know, the the

(28:12):
cute indigenous people like you know, mixing the beans with
their feet in all this, but there's nothing like, here's
a fermentation schedule. So again we looked at the literature
and discover again, you know, not as much as you
would want, but there are some good studies of cacao fermentation,
which seems like the most relevant next thing.

Speaker 4 (28:35):
We need to learn.

Speaker 5 (28:35):
Unfortunately, fermentation is something that I know a great deal
about from all of the you know, ancient bread projects
and other types of wild beast collection and stuff.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
I mean, fermentation is basically helpful rotting, right, It's like
microbial processing of your gunk into other kinds of gunk.

Speaker 5 (28:53):
Yeah, it's it's it's nanomachinery at your command. And so
it's primarily a yeast fermentation that then becomes a bacterial fermentation.
You can tell because of the temperature profile and timing
and the the off gassing that happens during cow fermentation.

(29:13):
And it's really an art form more than a science.
It's been studied some, but all the papers are from
you know, agriculture research stations, and so they're not really
you know, it's not the kind of paper that you
would look at and think this is really good, well
controlled data. But it's enough of a hint that we
felt we could figure it out, and so we did
a couple of things.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
But I think it's worth pausing there and noting like
a lot of this knowledge obviously wasn't developed using what
we would consider to be modern scientific empirical studies. Right,
It's like thousands of years of people accidentally doing stuff
and discovering, oh look what happens. Right, this is like
a random walk through through possibility space.

Speaker 5 (29:51):
Yeah, And look, I mean I think this is the
perfect example of the mind of a physicist in the
sense that you know, this is really a deeply kind
of artfull thing with a lot of feel in it,
and if you're going to bring a scientific process to it,
you need to bring that scientific process to it in

(30:14):
an open way, in a way where you're paying attention
to what's going on. And I think that this is
really the difference between like physics and engineering is like,
you know, I have a book project that's given me
the opportunity or the excuse to read you know, like
all of Heisenberg's papers and and Rutherford and you know

(30:34):
in his lab and you know, finding the neutron and
the thought process that those guys had. It's it's the
perfect analogy here. It's that you know, you cannot overpower this,
you cannot brute force this. They didn't have the equipment
to do that. So they had to just pay attention.

(30:55):
They had to surf along with nature. They had to
see what she would give up. Very careful, very aughtful.
And the rigor of your process isn't about like a
scorched earth colonization of ideas into engineering principles to be
put into a book. The rigor of your approach is
your own discipline in listening well and really seeing what's

(31:18):
happening right, and then that can give you a useful
tool and model that you can use then to understand
and then to predict perhaps. So that's what we tried
to do. You know, all of these people who talk
about being to bar and all of these chocolate people
who you know have their artisanal chocolate and curated blah
blah blah, assaulted carmel thing, you know, are buying cacabeans

(31:43):
from somewhere most of the time already dried and fermented,
and then talking about how they've made chocolate from scratch,
and that's not chocolate from scratch. We were making chocolate
from scratch and it was pretty hard. So we did it,
and it was a lot of work, and it was
really satisfying. And the best part is that, unlike when

(32:08):
you spend weeks, you know, solving some horrible partial differential
equation that gives you a part of a result that
you thought you needed but turns out not to be
what you wanted, but you still feel a sense of
soul and pride that you did it, and you can
only share it with yourself and two colleagues who can understand.
When you make chocolate, everybody's happy.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Okay, we have so much more chocolate and physics to
talk about it, but first we have to take a
quick break. Okay, we're back, and I'm talking to Seamus Blackley,

(32:50):
ex particle physicist, X inventor of the Xbox, current grower
of bread from ancient yeast, and CEO of a secretive
tech startup. And I'm talking to him because he has
made chocolate from dirt to bar. I want to hear
all the details, like you grow it, you harvest it,
you ferment it, you dry it, you roast it. Now
you have the nibs. How do you go from the

(33:11):
nibs to the actual bar.

Speaker 5 (33:13):
You buy a sea, or you find a seed, you
plant it, it grows a tree. You raise the tree, well,
you pollinate it. Pods appear. Interestingly, the pods on cacao
trees grow off of the trunk, not off the branches,
so it looks a little bit alien. And the pods
themselves actually look a little bit invasion of the body snatchers,
which is cool. When they're mature, they turn these beautiful

(33:37):
fall leaf colors, like it's the very new England of them,
Like these deep yellows and oranges and reds, very beautiful.
And you cut them off and you split them open,
and inside are these seeds that are covered in a
white pulp. And it's delicious. It smells like leachy fruit.
It's very fresh, very fragrant, and it tastes really good.

(33:58):
But the beans themselves are them very bitter, and it
tastes nothing like chocolate. There isn't a hint of chocolate
in any of the flavor profiles of any of this, okay.
The pods have a very planty smell, okay, very very fragrant,
like fresh cut grass, and the pulp has a kind

(34:21):
of a stringent but very pleasant, slightly sweet, light chy flavor.
And the beans are sort of these like purple bitter
soft seeds. And so when you hold this in your hand,
you think, how the hell does this become chocolate? Right,

(34:44):
So the next step is to ferment them. And to
do this, the beans are put into piles for thermal
purposes so that the heat of fermentation can build up,
which accelerates fermentation. And they have to be covered with
something that prevents moisture from escaping, because they require a

(35:05):
moist environment to ferment. And so we crew I have
plenty of fermentors that do excellent temperature control, so we
set up some fermentors with different piles. And in the
literature there are people in the industry who errate their piles,
who mix their piles, who don't touch them. There are

(35:26):
different varieties of cacao. We now know which variety we have,
but we didn't at the time. So the fermentation profiles
are apparently different between like let's say a creole, which
is one variety in.

Speaker 4 (35:38):
A front taro, which is a different variety.

Speaker 5 (35:41):
But fundamentally what happens is a yeast regular you know, sacrimics.
Yeast fermentation takes place and that creates a certain temperature profile.
So let's say the fermentor is running at eighty five
degrees and height. It will then go up to ninety

(36:03):
five or ninety eight degrees fahrenheit because of the heat
induced by the mechanical action of fermentation itself. The biological
action that will then fall off and you can smell
as you you know, as one does is going to
measure the temperature of your cockau fermentation piles. You can
smell a strong yeast nut, so you get a ready

(36:24):
note out of it, and the temperature will drop and
then it will rise again as the bacteria that are
symbiotic with those yeasts begin their fermentation process, and they
are an acid producing bacteria actually similar to the bacteria
that make acetic acid, and probably identical in many cases,

(36:49):
and you can smell that ascetic smell as you do
your temperature checks and potentially your rotations. There's a second
spike in temperature and then that goes down and this
takes anywhere from five to seven days, and you want
to be very careful because once that bacterial action ceases,

(37:09):
you're in danger of a mold step, which comes afterward
as the mold is no longer deterred in its growth
because of the action of the other organisms.

Speaker 4 (37:20):
Right.

Speaker 5 (37:21):
So, like in a lot of fermented foods, the preservation
comes from biological competition, not from sterility. So you know
in most fermented foods, or like in your starter for
your sourdough, the reason that it doesn't go bad right
away is because there's so much you know, bacterial action

(37:41):
from the yeast in bacteria in your starter that no
other organisms can compete, and that keeps it sterile. Okay,
So the same thing is happening in the cacao. You
don't want to let it go too long. But during
the end of that bacterial fermentation phase, and this is
the craziest thing in the universe, it starts to smell

(38:05):
like brownies.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Wow, that's when the chocolate comes back.

Speaker 5 (38:07):
So it goes from and I was not prepared for this,
and you can't read about this apparently, you know. I
have one of my son's best friends is from Trinidad,
and while I was doing this. He visited with my
son from from college and I was doing this fermentation

(38:30):
and he looked over and he's like, oh, you for
men and chocolate. Cool, because of course he'd seen this
his whole life, right, But for me, I was unprepared
for this transformation to take place. And it really smells
just like brownies. So it's gone from this very sort
of like grassy pod, light y, bitter thing to smelling

(38:57):
like bread to smelling like vinegar, and one day you
open the fermenter and it smells like brownies.

Speaker 4 (39:04):
It's insane.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Makes me wonder who the first human was to experience that,
you know, thousands of years ago.

Speaker 5 (39:10):
One experiment that I will do shortly is to just
leave some cocow pods around and to see if I
let them ferment internally. If I crack them open, at
some point they smell like chocolate. You can imagine that
somebody happens upon one that's sat for the right amount
of time and it's delicious smelling, right, it might occur

(39:32):
to that person to try to recreate that somehow, right,
So then you dry them. They have at this point
become kind of like a very dry mac and cheese consistency,
So you spread the beans out on a dehydrator or
out in the sun. We use a dehydrator because we
can control it, and you get them to about three

(39:55):
percent moister content, and I have all the equipment to measure,
but you know, it just basically means pretty dry, and
it takes a while. It takes about two days, and
if you're running the drying machines in your house, it'll
drive you insane because your whole house will smell like brownies,

(40:15):
but at first, sort of acid brownies, because the vinegar
smell is still there, and as you dry them, it
goes down, but there's still notes of vinegar from the
bacterial fermentation process in the beans, and you end up
with these brown cacao beans and they're a little shrunken
and a little sad looking. And then you're ready to roast.

(40:39):
And the roasting is again, it's pretty similar to coffee roasting,
but it's much easier and shorter. And I'm really glad
that I had done coffee roasting in the past because
it prepared me for this. But you roast them with
a decreasing thermal profile from about two hundred and fifty

(40:59):
down to two hundred sea and you want the bean
temperature to get to around two hundred C at the end,
and you'll hear them crack. If you have three percent moisture,
that moisture the inside the bean will boil and and
pop the shell. Actually it's it's kind of like ads, right.

(41:20):
It goes from it changes the curvature of the shell,
and then you get a pop and then you know
that you're done. And people will do two pops or
one pop. And there's a lot of YouTube video on
this because people buy a lot of fermented dried beans
from South America and process the chocolate at them. That's
one of the things that a fancy San Francisco chocolate

(41:42):
chop will do. Okay, so we sort of after I
did the fermentation and the drawing, I re entered the
realm where there's a lot of video help on how
to do this right. But I didn't really look at
it because I was like, I'm better than all of them.
I did all this right, So do the roasting. And
then you have these beans that are sort of like
now puffy, so they're kind of you know, rugby ball shaped,

(42:05):
and then you have to shell them and they are
machines that do this. When you buy commercial nibs, the
nib is actually the bean itself once it's been shelled,
after being roasted and dried, dried and roasted, they're all
little bits and it's because of the machine in order
to remove the shell mechanically has to sort of pulverize everything.

(42:27):
But if you do it by hand sitting in front
of the television, you get the complete beans out. And
they're a pictures of this on my Twitter. And I
have to say, during the roasting process, what happens is
the vinegar smells and all the other strange odors go
away and you're left with just a pure chocolate smell.
And it's very very remarkable. It smells like the most

(42:49):
incredible chocolate cake brownie that you've ever baked in your
oven at the end of the roasting process.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
I've actually roasted cacao beans myself on the stovetop and
been amazed. It's like a a river of chocolate smell.
It's like snorting pure chocolate. It's incredible.

Speaker 4 (43:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (43:06):
And so then from there you go on and do
the normal thing to make chocolate. And it's important to
have a wet grinder it's important to let it go
for you know, three or four days, because the cocow
beans are actually just basically wood and it's extremely fibrous,
but it contains you know, a lot of fat, the

(43:27):
cocow butter inside that fibers structure. And there's a sort
of a magical thing that happens when you grind this
and you get a little bit of heat out of
the mechanical grinding action, which is that you start to
get this magical paste and that's that's getting close to
the thing that we think of as chocolate. And you

(43:51):
have to wet grind this thing and a wet stone
grinder for days and days to get the average particle
size small enough in that fiber structure that on the
tongue it feels like.

Speaker 4 (44:04):
You would expect from smooth chocolate.

Speaker 5 (44:07):
And so that takes a lot of time, and it
turns out some equipment and knowledge. I did a little study,
you know, because I have microscopes and autoclaves and all
the stuff in my kitchen from the bread projects. So
I was able to do some smears and look at
average particle sizes and correlate that. Because I was given
the hint from some chocolate tears correlate that with the

(44:29):
current drawn by the malange by the wet grinder. There's
a pretty linear relationship between you amount a current that
you're using and the particle size, and that's how they
determine when they get done.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
So you can tell the size of your chocolate particles
by how hard your grinder has to work. Basically that's correct, yeah,
at a given temperature. And then there's some chemistry involved
in like actually making it a bar. It's got like
some complex crystal structure that you need to reach with
the right temperature voyage for this whole process. Right.

Speaker 5 (44:58):
You know, I'm going to go ahead and call that
physic because it's really crystallography. You know, I work with
a lot of chemists, so we can we you know,
we can fight over this.

Speaker 4 (45:07):
But yeah. The trick then after that.

Speaker 5 (45:10):
Is to make it into a stable bar, and that
means establishing with the cacao butter with that fat. It's
type two crystal, which is a stable crystalin matrix in
shirt sleeve room temperature conditions for human beings. That's referred

(45:31):
to in the industry as temper, but it's really a
crystaline structure as you know, and alluded to, and so
finding out how to establish that is a bit of
a trick. And part of the problem that we had
is we know too much. So it was me and
biologists and chemists and another physicist, and so we knew
too much about crystallography. So we did all these crazy
schemes that only kind of partially worked. And then finally

(45:53):
we just did the thing that everybody else doesn't work
fine and made bars. And you know, when we made
the first chocolate from our own beans from our trees,
all of us thought it was the best chocolate we'd
ever had, easily, And I am still completely ruined. It's

(46:19):
been six months now, but I am ruined, and my
wife is ruined, and everyone is ruined. We can't we
get other chocolate and it's just not as good. And
recently I was very very very brave, and I gave
a bar of this chocolate to my friend jose Andres,

(46:42):
the chef, and he said it was the best chocolate
he's ever had, and he's now told other people it's
the best chocolate he's ever had. And so, you know,
I think that keeping everything simple and pure, you know,
not adding anything, the only ingredient in ourcolate bar is
sugar in some measure to give you, you know, the amount.

Speaker 4 (47:03):
That you like.

Speaker 5 (47:04):
How dark do you want your chocolate? In our case,
we went to about seventy percent. How it sounds amazing,
there's nothing else in it, and it's it's really good,
and you know, we're going to keep on doing it
because it's so good. It's it's it's very interesting and really,

(47:27):
even though it's so hard to do and has so
many steps, the magic in the last part of the fermentation.

Speaker 4 (47:38):
Is worth it. It's worth it.

Speaker 5 (47:41):
I do it over and over again because I never
tire of that moment when it changes to chocolate.

Speaker 4 (47:45):
It's incredible.

Speaker 5 (47:47):
And you know, I'm around fermentation all the time. We
have the Ancient Bread project, other bread projects, other fermentation projects,
and you know, the even when you're doing beer making,
the fermentation is a you know, nano machinery process and

(48:07):
service of something else, in service of getting CO two
distributed evenly through you know, a piece of dough so
that you can freeze it in the oven and have
bread right freeze the structure by baking. In the case
of the cacao, the fermentation it is the flavor, it's everything.
It's remarkable.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
So, now that you've had this incredible dark chocolate and
you understand it all the way from Dirk to bar,
what are your thoughts on industrial chocolate, for example Hershey's.

Speaker 5 (48:35):
Oh, it's a valid industrial product. Sometimes you have to
have these things, and you know, I'm not gonna I'm
not going to crap on them. It's it's an incredible story. Actually,
the Hershey's story is an incredible story, both from a
business and a technology standpoint. But I am ruined now,

(48:57):
and I very seriously considering, you know, expanding this operation
and maybe trying to grow a bunch more trees kind
of hydroponically in this way and seeing if you could
make more of this special chocolate in that way, so

(49:20):
we'll see.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Sounds amazing and sounds delicious. Well, thanks very much for
taking us on a tour of your chocolate adventure. Really
happy to be grabbing on your coattails and following along
to learn.

Speaker 5 (49:32):
Daniel, it's always a pleasure to talk to you man.
Send me more of your best students, please.

Speaker 4 (49:38):
We'll do.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
Thanks very much, Take care all.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
Right, pretty interesting conversation there, Daniel. What is your big
takeaway from all of this chocolate science.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
The takeaway for me is that once a physicist, always
a physicist. You're trained to think like a physicist. You're
going to apply that to everything else you do in
your life, whether it's baking bread and venting new video
game consoles or growing chocolate bars.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Now, do you think knowing all of this physics is
helping him make better chocolate or is he actually leaning
on chemistry?

Speaker 2 (50:11):
I think there's a fuzzy line here.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Absolutely, it sounds like pretty straight up chemistry. He's definitely
scientific thinking, no offense, no offense.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Yeah, that's fine, I get it. You know, the chocolate
is more chemistry than physics. I'll admit it.

Speaker 1 (50:24):
Absolutely, so his physic preparation is of no help.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
I mean he didn't get down to like the fundamental
chocolate particle or anything. So having been a particle physicist,
I don't think is an issue. But definitely his scientific
background helped him, like read the papers and do this
carefully and methodically and you know, gather some data.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Well, I feel like this is maybe like a small
badge type of chocolate production. But things get a little
bit more complicated and maybe more difficult when you try
to scale it up and you try to give chocolate
to a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
Yeah, exactly. You have a lot more freedom to play
when you're making up just a few bars for you
and your friends. But when you're the chief chocolate officer
at one of the world's biggest snacks food companies, then
you have a whole different set of challenges.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Well, you actually got to talk to a former research
scientist at a large corporation. How did you meet this fellow?

Speaker 2 (51:13):
So One of our listeners, Darcio, is a chocolate researcher
in Brazil, and heard us joking about chocolate on the
podcast and wrote to me suggesting that we do a
deep dive into chocolate. He was actually the inspiration for
this episode and introduced me to his friend Jim Kaiser,
former chief chocolate officer at Mars Inc.

Speaker 1 (51:33):
Well wait, wait, wait, wait, we know an actual chocolate researcher, Like,
what's this research?

Speaker 2 (51:39):
It's like chemical engineering, you know, industrial processes for producing
chocolate at scale with consistency and purity and quality.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
WHOA yeah, because I guess they farm a lot of
chocolate in Brazil, right.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
They do farm a lot of chocolate all over the world,
and in the interview with him, we talk about the
challenges of getting chocolate from all different locations where the
processes are different.

Speaker 1 (52:02):
M how there is a different taste that come from
different themes.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
Right exactly, which is not what you want if you're
the Mars company. You want your eminem to taste the
same no matter where you are in the world and
which batch of chocolate it was. We'll get into all that,
but first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back

(52:31):
and we're talking about physics and chocolate.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
All right, Well, here's Daniel's interview with Professor Kaiser, former
chocolate research scientists at Mars Corporation.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
So it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast. John Kaiser,
an expert in mass production of chocolate and a researcher
who has worked on the forefront of chocolate knowledge. John,
Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 3 (52:54):
Thank you, Daniel. That's a happy day if I get
to talk about chocolate. I appreciate you invited me to
this podcast.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
Thank you. Well. First, I want to know how does
one become a chocolate researcher. Is that something you grew
up wanting to be and followed your passion or you
stumbled into it.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
I knew I wanted to work on food. My father
had worked on food at PNG, their brands pring, goals, folders,
and I love the black box. And that's what chemical
engineers solve. We have raw materials, dried potatoes and everyone
inside the box, and you have a beautifully shaped pring

(53:32):
go out the other end. It tastes, it looks straight.
So I was always fascinated by what's the black box?
So I knew I did enter the food industry, and
I started craft in Chicago, first up in glen View,
working on a variety of food brands, ice cream, mayonnaise,
and Miracle Web. And then that led us to a

(53:55):
role at Mars working on cocoa and chocolate. That's where
I spent almost thirty years. Wow, every aspect of coca
and child production globally.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
So what do people not know about making chocolate? I mean,
it's much more than just roast the beans and blend
them up. What it is sort of the secret sauce
to turning cocoa beans into chocolate that people might not understand.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
Well, I'd say the fascinating part of chocolate, and I
always include cocoa as part of that is how difficult
it is to produce a consistent, wonderful tasting product. And
that's really what's kept me intrigued in this area for
so many years, and I still work on it here

(54:42):
at iowas Fate. So the linkage I see is nearly
every aspect of the unit operations a chemical engineering study,
from harvest of a cocoa pod in origin, all the
way to a molded product in M and M or
she makee chocolate bar. Nearly every aspect has a linkage

(55:04):
to flavor and texture and solving that, Understanding that and
understanding that in an operational role every day is not easy.
So that's really kept me very interesting because there is
issues all along that product pipeline.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
Give us an example of something that's challenging in mass
production of delicious chocolate.

Speaker 3 (55:27):
So back to the complexity. So cocoa is not cocoa,
first of all, So the variety of cocoa that you
find in the origin can have an bone on flavor.
So you have to pick what you want, and what
you want is what the consumer ultimately wants, so you
have to really start with the consumer. But how that
product is harvested really more how it's fermented in origin

(55:52):
can again have a major impact on flavor. For example,
and practices are not standardized. Growers farmers across the globe
don't have a script and say oh, this is how
we do it now. They don't have the script. They
do it based on history, they do it based on economics.
It's not well controlled. As soon as pods are opened

(56:15):
in the origin, they're opening with machete. I mean, that
is the typical way of opening a pod. Pods have
a very thick husk. You extract about fifty beans from
a pod, and the beans are surrounded by the sticky, gooey,
high sugar, high acid, relatively speaking, pulp that actually tastes delicious.

(56:36):
By the way, if you're in origin, taste taste the beans.
Don't chew the beans because extremely a stringent it. We'll
get to that point here about fermentation. But as you
suck the pulp off the beans, they have a very
pleasant fruity characteristic that those in Ecuador and Brazil. Darcie
who can speak to this, will extract that and convert

(56:58):
into a beverage.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
Like a chocolate fruit beverage.

Speaker 3 (57:01):
It really doesn't taste like chocolate at all. It just
has a fruity, pleasant flavor.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
I wonder how many people have ever tasted that. I
don't think I know anybody else who's ever tasted the
actual chocolate fruit.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
It's definitely rare. You know, you have to pasteurize it
in origin if you want to ship it somewhere. Because
here's the point. It's the microfloor in environment automatically goes
after those sugars as soon as you open it, so
fermentation starts the instant you open the pot. Those beans
are manually scooped out. And this may seem a bit

(57:33):
our kid because it is because it has not really
changed over the course of you know, at least one
hundred years. Where those beans are then piled on banana LEAs,
typically on the ground in origin heat and the fermentation begins.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
And to be clear, fermentation means like microbial processing. Right,
basically we're talking about desirable rotting, right.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
That's it. That's exactly correct, okay, but has a huge influence.
So if you and some growers do this around the
globe where they'll skip the fermentation, they'll go straight to
dry it. And if you do that, the beans are
very very stringent, very bitter, and there are some recipes
that may be an attribute you want and it's another

(58:21):
i say, processed driver that you can use to influence
your flavor. But typically say the fermentation is between five
and seven days, five.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
And seven days sitting there rotting on a banana leaf.

Speaker 3 (58:33):
Yes, Now the larger drowers will have i'll call box fermentation.
They'll place these beans in a much larger, larger wooden
box and then they'll actually use a hand agitator really
just hand scoop and move those beans around, because you
imagine the thermal heat of the fermentation will be greatest

(58:54):
in the center, so you want to spread that out
across the whole box. So yeah, for sure, beings that
are not fermented and those that are fully fermented will
taste dramatically different. And those practices are very different, y'all say,
the more the standardized fermentation process that we've witnessed or

(59:15):
those that you see in West Africa Ivory Coast, Godam
where they're typically fully fermented. Now keep in mind, you
can go, you can be over fermented, and that will
also cause a flavor impact. And then anything in between
zero and say five to seven days. So this is
where the complexity just begins Dandiel. So you can have

(59:36):
a whole range of flavor influences and I won't call
it a flavor defect because flavor is subjective. You may
love it, hey, I love an over fermented being in
its flavor or totally underfremented. So it actually ends up
being a consumer driven experience. What do they want?

Speaker 2 (59:55):
But if you want to produce the same eminem every day,
every year for thirty years, how do you you handle
that when you get a batch of over fermented and
a batch of under fermented. Do you have to adjust
the process or do you have some way to mask
it or how does that work?

Speaker 3 (01:00:08):
That's one of the distinctions you're hitting right now is
the small versus large. I'm a little biased because I
spent my career at Marsin and we're working on all
these challenges across thirty years, and it is difficult to
make an eminent taste the same around the globe. It
is very difficult because you have so many influences, including

(01:00:30):
the practices they're observed. So the way you mitigate that
is a lot of coke we purchased off the market,
but per our spec, per our flavor and chemical spec.
So you want to make sure that it is fermented
properly and you're buying best specification. So that's how Marge
will do it all the way to mitigate am I

(01:00:51):
giving anything? Wait here, this is pretty typical for a
Hurshy and Mars and I'm on delays.

Speaker 4 (01:00:57):
Is there's a.

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
Cocoa recipe, You would not bank the farm on a
single origin. You want a percentage of different origins and
that gives you the flavor profile that is consistent, and
it also helps mitigate that risk because civil wars do
occur in ivory coasts.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Yeah, you have.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
Weather impact, sustainability concerns. Lots of these things will occur
over the course of a year, and you have to
be prepared to move around and ensure that the product
still meets the products back.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
So what's the major difference between like very fancy, artisanal
small batch bar chocolate you might pay like eight dollars
for and something like a Hershey bar. Is it the
quality of the chocolate? Is it preservatives? Is something different
in the process? What is basically the difference between the
spectrum of quality for chocolate?

Speaker 3 (01:01:53):
The large manufacturer has a lot more at risk. So
if you have a recall a product because of some
microbial contamination or adulteration due to incidental form matter that's
in the product you're recalling. It could could really sacrifice
your brand. So the large manufacturers tend to be very conservative,

(01:02:15):
but they're very consistent, I'd say very consistent. The smaller
players have more leeway, they have less at risk, and
they're faster, they're more flexible, you know. I think the
thing that I think is interesting is the large manufacturers
have a business. Eminem's the biggest global brand for chocolate.
They want to be as flexible as small guys, but

(01:02:37):
they can't. The small guys want to have more market share,
but that's a challenge for them also, so the small manufacturers,
as you said costs before this call, it just took
a look at a cost program. Two cents per gram
for a Dove or Hershey no chocolate roughly sense a

(01:03:00):
gram for she had Dandili, which is a very specialty
niche product. Really, you know, that's the difference in order,
mattitude in difference. So what are consumers willing to pay
for what they get?

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
Let's talk about the Hershey bar also because it's iconic.
On the podcast, recently, I commented that I was not
a particular fan of the Hershey bar because it has
this sour flavor to it. Where does that sourness come from?
Is it some property of milk chocolate? Is it some
secret process that Hershey has? Why are Hershey bar so sour?

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Yes? I love the history of chocolate, so let's talk hershy.
Hershey started making caramel in Lancaster, PA. That's where my
family and I spent thirty years just north of there
in Mannheim. Started that business, Uh, grew it pretty well
downtown Lancaster, went to the expo in Chicago, to this
famous expo where this iconic Columbian Expo in Chicago, where

(01:03:59):
he came across Layman, which is a German may Fast
of chocolate, really liquored melliing equipment came across that thought
at that time that the future is chocolate, not carmel.
So moved to child production, bought that equipment in Chicago,
brought it back and started Hershey pid making chocolate small scale.

(01:04:22):
Didn't know how to do it yet, didn't know how.
He hired a German scientist by named of Klein Klein
and with him began to learn about child production. And
if you ever talked to a European I go into
this fair Hersey. I just want to give you kind

(01:04:44):
of what my skew is. I might spin on it is,
and you've already mentioned this. The Europeans are not accustomed
to sour milk in their chocolate. They're just not accustomed
to it. And that's the history of chocolate and whether
a child taste very different from those in the US.
So the story is, and I'm sure a Hershey representative

(01:05:04):
may dispute my spin on this, is we talked to
Europeans and say, you know, they got the process of
drying liquid milk wrong in that it became the lipid
catalysis that creates organic acids that gives you the sour
character that you get from baby puke.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
I'm sorry, did you just say baby puke?

Speaker 3 (01:05:28):
I did?

Speaker 4 (01:05:29):
I did.

Speaker 3 (01:05:29):
And I've heard those terms from other Hershey people, so
I'm not taking these terms out of context.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
So we have it on the record from an expert
in chocolate that Hershey's tastes like baby puke.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
Yeah. Introbution on this one. And as I said, flavor
is subjective. My father loves Hershey chocolate that's what he
was offered. That's what he ate. He still loves it,
and it has a unique i'll call it a unique
acid character. It's organic acid, but tyic acid flavor in
that chocolate. It gives it that unique flavor. So the

(01:06:04):
story is, and it could be a myth that in
the process because it was not known how to dry
liquid milk and do it in an efficient way that
did not harm the quality, not in the US. Nestley
was figuring that out in Europe. Okay, so they were
figuring it out Hers. She was trying to do it

(01:06:25):
his way and came up with a way to do it.
Developed this acidic flavor which became the profile, which is
now their signature flavor, and it is well welllife. It's
the biggest brand in the US, so they've got something
going on there. So, you know, no disparaging Hershey, they've
got a well, well liked product that consumers here really love.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
I mean, if you can make a billion dollar business
out of a baby puke candy, then hats off to you, right,
Like wow, very impressive. I could never pcomplished that. I
don't think I'd invest in that startup, but I'd be wrong. Apparently.
So then you know, if we are still innovating on
chocolate and still using chemical engineering and creative ideas to
develop new chocolates, what's happening right now, what's like at

(01:07:14):
the forefront of chocolate research, the most brilliant minds in chocolate.
What problems are they trying to crack right now?

Speaker 3 (01:07:21):
So if you look at the headlines today, sustainability, carbon dioxide,
so things are around. Replacing dairy powders with plant based
proteins are hot. They were hot five years ago. I
know there's interest in it and they are still very
important to consider to reduce greenhouse gases to manage I

(01:07:44):
know Mars for sure has a sustainability plan, and all
the large manufacturers certainly have a public disclosed approach that
they're taking for that. So anything around the way that
is processed is being examined to reduce energy consumption. That's
I say a blanket statement because each of these components

(01:08:07):
where it's roasting, conching which is an intensive mixing step,
or size reduction, are very energy intensive. There's a lot
of energy that's required to get to the state that's
appealing to consumers. So any place now it's more innovation
on the process side. Okay, it's innovation with the process side,
but it's really important, important for the manufacturer, and also

(01:08:31):
the consumer is also looking at businesses to see what
they're doing that's good for the planet. So for sure,
that's where a lot of the innovation is occurring. And then,
as I mentioned, on the ingredient side, is more plant
based raw materials that can be used and still deliver
that superior taste.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
Fascinating. Now, you mentioned you started your career being intrigued
in things like pringles. You've taken the potatoes one side
and outcome these perfect crisps. And I've noticed this bizarre
innovation in desserts recently, this chocolate covered pringles. And since
you began your career in pringles and you ended up
in chocolate, I wondered, is this something you came up with?

(01:09:09):
Is this your unholy unification of the snack universe?

Speaker 3 (01:09:13):
I can't take credit for that, I could, but do
you enjoy them?

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
Do you think?

Speaker 3 (01:09:19):
For sure? Yeah? I think that said the savory sweet combination,
I think it is very good, really appealing, and coming
from the chocolate capital of the US, which is southeastern Pennsylvania,
that's Hershey, Bars's large operation there. You have Blomber, which
is a large industrial producer there, get divers based out

(01:09:42):
of it. You have a lot of candy, a lot
of candy, your peppermint patties, your Pennsylvania so you have
a lot of candy production that curve there. It's also
the savory snack capital. Oh I see, so hey they're
both there. Why not?

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
So nobody knows snacking like Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
Pressols a lot of pressol production the Dutch. You know,
if you ever go to live as Pennsylvania, it's deemed
the place for prezols in the US for first created.
And that's not far from Lancaster. So yeah, pretzels and
savory snacks are really big in that part of the country.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
Well, I guess we have Pennsylvania to thank us for
pushing us forward on the forefront of human snacking. That's amazing,
And thanks very much John Kayser for telling us all
about chocolate production and the challenges in producing huge quantities
of consistent chocolate that everybody enjoys around the world. Really
appreciate your time.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
Well, thanks for the invitation. This has been a blast
for me. Appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:39):
All right, interesting. What did you think about how they
approach chocolate making in large scales.

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
I think it's fascinating how the small batch people are
really trying to make a unique flavor and the large
batch people are really not. They're really struggling with the
same question, but they're on different sides of the issue.
Jim talks about how the difference in the fermentation process
leads to different kinds of flavor, and that sounds awesome
if you're artisanal, but that's a nightmare if you're industrial.

Speaker 1 (01:11:08):
Well, I feel like it's not like they're not trying
to come up with anique, unique flavor. It's like they're
trying to keep the flavor consistent.

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
They might be aiming for, like the flavor of the
most amount of people like and to make that consistent.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
Yeah, I think that is exactly what they're going for.
And also I didn't realize what a deep rivalry there
is between Hershey and Mars. There's a long history there
involving like espionage and theft and like really deep anger
between these two companies. And you all know that Hershey's
isn't my favorite, but no disrespect to those who love it.
Because it's not about costs. There's lots of cheap chocolate

(01:11:43):
out there I love, and expensive ones I don't. It's
just personal preference. So probably if I want an unbiased
opinion about the flavor of Hershey's chocolate, I shouldn't have
been talking to somebody from Mars.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
Well, I didn't even know there are two separate companies,
Like there's just those two, Like those are the big chocolate.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
Those two Pennsylvania snack companies really do dominate the chocolate market.

Speaker 1 (01:12:07):
And they're both based in Pennsylvania, m.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
Exactly the snack capital of the world. According to Jim Geyser.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
Wow, why Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
Somebody from Pennsylvania has to answer that for us?

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):
Well, we might have to buy him at Bar Chocolate.
We live to tell us.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
Once that grant comes in, we'll be ready to do that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
All right. Well, another interesting dive into daniels as snack habits.
Hasn't your doctor at this age told you, like, hey,
maybe you should dial down on the saturated fats.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
There, No chocolate is healthy. Man has all sorts of
good stuff in it in moderation.

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
Again, we're doctors, but we're not that kind of doctor.

Speaker 2 (01:12:43):
Fermented foods. Man, My wife tells me fermented foods are
good for your gut.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
These statements of not being approved by the Federal Drug Administration.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51):
Do not take health advice from me. Please, do not
take healthy peace. Don't even take writing advice from me
or anything that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:59):
Don't they advice.

Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
Career advice, life advice, any of that stuff. Just listen
for the jokes and the knowledge.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
Yeah, how about physics.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
Advice and doing my best to give us an honest
understanding of the physics of the universe for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
joining us. See you next time.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social
media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, disc, Org, Insta,
and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(01:13:42):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.