How Chocolate Developed My Love For Science

Science. I like the topic quite a lot, but it’s far too broad for a two page essay – I can and have gone on far longer than that about a single research topic. Now, an essay about the intersection of me and science… Though it’s still an extensive topic, it can be reasonably compressed to a few pages if I skip all the boring details. But all the fun is in the details and I want this to be a fun essay, both for me to write and for you to read. So we’ll have to narrow it down a little further, to how I first came to appreciate science in my everyday life.

This should not be confused with the event that first sparked my interest in science. That happened far too long ago for me to remember, and probably involved some sort of explosion. No, despite my constant interest in the subject and the knowledge of science’s omnipresence and usefulness, I did not truly appreciate it in my life until very recently. The item that brought about this revelation was not anything particularly important – it was a book on chocolate making.

Before I received this book, I had been an indifferent chocolateir. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas I turned out about a hundred truffles (I have a large family), but I had never progressed beyond the basics – a cup of cream, a cup of chocolate, some flavoring. While I still can’t claim to be good at chocolate making, my creations have certainly become much more involved, and I enjoy the process a great deal more now, all because of one section of the book that captured my attention – the material science of chocolate making.

For example, chocolate tempering. I didn’t know there was any such thing, but this book informed me that cocoa butter is a polymorphous crystal, and can set in six forms – For...

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...ly I could temper chocolate consistently! Then I will know I have mastered that part of the art, and can move on – to, say, learning about the properties of sweeteners. Because apparently glucose syrups, granulated sugar, confectioners’ sugar, molasses, and something called invert syrup all have completely different properties and actually it’s really fascinating how …

Anyway. For me, science is more than an interest and future career – it’s a hobby. I love finding the causes behind every day phenomena, especially when the phenomena itself is behind the scenes. Really the best thing about science is that it makes everything else more interesting. Why simply make chocolates when you can instead coax a polymorphous solid into forming the perfect crystalline structure, and make chocolate? It’s a wonderful world. And it’s even better when we experiment with it.