Episode 8: Yes, Chocolate is a Material

We all think of metals, ceramics, polymers, electronic materials, composites and so forth as materials. But what else? Is chocolate an engineering material? In this episode we dive into this amazing substance and describe the critical processing steps that makes it a unique including regional differences in cocoa, chocolate tempering and more. Along the way we'll cover the fundamental materials science topic of crystallization and solidification.

If you want to learn more about the science of chocolate there is a huge body of literature. Some publications you can check out are Beckett's Industrial Chocolate Manufacture and Use, Fifth Edition https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118923597 which is essentially the industry standard in this field. There are also some great review articles like “Fat bloom in chocolate and compound coatings” by Lonchampt and Hartel https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejlt.200400938. There's also the excellent book Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik. Finally, Harvard University has an excellent YouTube series on the science of cooking including a great episode on chocolate that is worth checking out https://youtu.be/HS263kcm8Jc.

If you have questions or feedback please send us emails at [email protected]. Check out our Instagram page @materialism.podcast. We’d like to give a shoutout to AlphaBot for allowing us to use his music within the podcast. Check him out on Spotify. And as always a special thanks to Kolobyte who created the intro and outro for our podcast. He makes a ton of really cool synthwave music which you can check out at kolobyte.bandcamp.com.

This episode is sponsored by Matmatch.com, check them out for a really cool and free to use web-based tool for finding engineering materials to fit any application.

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