Chocolate, silky and mellow, is intoxicating, but it is not easy for melted chocolate to solidify again! Proper cooling treatment is crucial for achieving perfect molding.

When people are feeling down, they often like to have a dessert to relax. Have you ever thought about the scientific principles involved in the process of making delicious desserts? For example, why can't double skin milk be heated in the microwave? That's because double skin milk has a high protein content, and microwave heating can easily cause local overheating, damaging the protein structure and resulting in a worse taste or even loss of its original form. Why is chocolate easy to melt but difficult to solidify again? This is determined by the composition and physical properties of chocolate, which requires a specific environment and time for it to melt at a certain temperature before solidifying.

Let's explore the wonderful scientific world behind chocolate from a physics perspective, and feel the perfect fusion of food and science! Chocolate, this charming delicacy, is actually a complex multiphase dispersed system, with cocoa butter as the continuous phase and sugar as the dispersed phase. At room temperature, it is a solid phase and melts when it approaches body temperature. However, miraculously, liquid chocolate is difficult to solidify again when the temperature drops to room temperature. This starts with its main component cocoa butter and production process. Cocoa butter has unique crystallization characteristics and diverse crystal structures. During production, special treatment is used to form a stable crystal structure in chocolate. Once melted and cooled again, it is difficult to restore the original crystalline state and cannot solidify back into its original solid state. The melting and solidification of chocolate is like a mysterious magic performance, hiding the wonderful secrets of science!

Cocoa butter, a natural vegetable oil derived from cocoa beans, plays a crucial role in the world of chocolate. Its main ingredient is triglycerides, with astonishing levels, laying the foundation for the deliciousness of chocolate. When chocolate solidifies, liquid cocoa butter will miraculously crystallize, forming regular crystal lattices that firmly fix various dispersed phases, bringing a sweet taste. There are various types of triglycerides in natural cocoa butter, exhibiting homogeneous and polycrystalline characteristics. At present, research has found up to 6 crystal forms, with different molecular arrangements and increasing thermodynamic stability. It is interesting that any higher melting point crystal form can transition from a lower melting point crystal form. This magical trait makes cocoa butter a magical elf in the chocolate world, bringing us endless sweet surprises.

In the mysterious world of chocolate, the unique charm of high-quality chocolate cannot be separated from the magical crystal structure of cocoa butter. Among them, crystal form V endows chocolate with the best characteristics, making it hard and stable at room temperature, but instantly melting upon entry, bringing an incredibly wonderful taste. However, achieving such perfect chocolate is not an easy task. During the production process, it is necessary to carefully adjust the temperature - heat it through water to make it flow, cool it down to make it solidify, reheat it to make it stable, and cool it again to achieve perfection.

This evolution is often accompanied by the appearance of frost flowers, causing the chocolate surface to have grease frost and lose its luster. The melting point of cocoa butter with type VI crystals is about 36 degrees Celsius, and it does not melt upon entry, resulting in a poor taste. Due to the stability of type VI crystals, frosting is difficult to avoid. But we are not helpless. In addition to keeping chocolate at a constant temperature (21 ± 1 degrees Celsius) and storing it in ventilation, emulsifiers are also widely believed to delay frosting. Through these methods, we can minimize the frosting time as much as possible and preserve the wonderful taste of chocolate.   

Chocolate, this delicious solid-state thermosensitive dessert, requires multiple delicate processes to be produced. Cocoa butter, cocoa powder, sugar, dairy products, surfactants and other raw materials are mixed, refined, temperature adjusted, molded, frozen and solidified into sweetness in our hands. However, chocolate storage requires extra caution. Overheated environment will cause the cocoa butter to melt, and all crystal forms will disappear, becoming the same liquid phase. Generally, the melting and solidification temperatures of compounds are the same, but cocoa butter has viscosity and homogeneous polycrystalline phenomenon, and the solidification temperature is lower than the melting temperature, resulting in phase transition hysteresis. This lag is related to the structure of triglycerides, emulsifiers, molecular solubility, and stirring speed.

Chocolate, silky and mellow, is intoxicating, but it is not easy for melted chocolate to solidify again! Proper cooling treatment is crucial for achieving perfect molding. For small-scale handmade chocolate making, a freezer may be sufficient to meet the demand. However, when faced with large-scale production, our Cooling Tunnel will be your high-quality choice.