Scientists claim to have unlocked the “secret sauce” necessary for fine chocolate | Food sciences
Whether you enjoy an aromatic bar with caramel notes or something less fanciful, chocolate can have many tastes. Now the researchers say they have highlighted a key ingredient that could open the door to new flavors.
They claim to have not spoken how and why the bacteria and fungi involved in the fermentation of cocoa beans influence the flavor of chocolate.
“We now understand what we need microbes and what they do. And I think that opens the opportunity … to be much more directed [about] How we manufacture our chocolate in terms of flavor, “said Professor David Salt, co-author of the work of the University of Nottingham.
Writing in the journal Nature Microbiology, the team reports how they studied beans fermented in cocoa farms in three different regions of Colombia – Santander, Huila and Antioquia.
The researchers discovered that if the fermentation process was similar for the farms of Santander and Huila, the beans of the Antioquia farm have shown different models of temperature and pH, which was most likely due to the presence and activity of a different group of microbes.
Other research has revealed that while the cocoa liqueur based on beans of the Santander and Huila farms had fruity and floral notes – similar to the characteristics of a fine flavor cocoa of Madagascar – the cocoa liqueur made from antioquia beans lacked fruity flowers, flower production of bulk chocolate.
The team then used genetic sequencing to identify the microbes involved in the fermentation of cocoa beans from several sites in Colombia and beyond, explore the genes they contained, and thus identify the flavored substances they could produce during fermentation.
Consequently, the researchers identified nine microbes which, together, had to produce the notes of a cocoa with fine flavor. They then presented this community to sterile cocoa beans and enabled them to ferment.
The result, said Salt, was a cocoa with floral notes, fruity and citrus and a recognizable cocoa flavor but with a reduced astrint and bitterness.
“I call it secret sauce,” said Salt.
He said the results may have a number of applications, in particular by helping cocoa farmers to find ways to promote the presence of key microbes during fermentation to ensure that they can reproduce the required conditions for high quality cocoa.
This could even help the current chocolate cost crisis, said salt, suggesting that if cocoa producers could produce more tasty cocoa, less would be necessary during production.
And there was another possibility.
“You can bring either inoculums [of microbes] This could bring special flavors, new flavors that you do not normally see in cocoa, “he said.” Or you could really find strategies to biaise fermentation, to offer new flavors. »»
