How scientists are making chocolate tastier and more nutritious

Scientists are giving chocoholics news that sounds too good to be true: they say a “more flavourful” and healthy variation could be on its way.

Dark chocolate – in healthy doses – may be a helper in lowering blood pressure, managing cholesterol and improving heart health. If it isn’t in a candy bar laced with sugar, chocolate is also packed with antioxidants and flavonoids, which fight damage to your body’s cells.

Researchers out of the University of Ghana say they’re exploring new ways to tweak the chocolate-making process so that the sweet is more nutritious and – somehow – tastier.

Right now, cocoa takes on a lengthy process before it transforms into chocolate. Workers cut down pods from the cocoa trees, split them open to extract the cocoa beans, which are then fermented in banana-lined baskets and set out to dry in the sun.

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Roasting the beans brings out the flavour, but this step eats up the healthy polyphenols – the antioxidants – in the process. The scientists wondered if they could manipulate the process so that they could retain as much of the polyphenols and flavours as possible.

“We decided to add a pod-storage step before the beans were even fermented to see whether that would have an effect on the polyphenol content,” Dr. Emmanuel Ohene Afoakwa, explained in a statement.

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“This is not traditionally done, and this is what makes our research fundamentally different. It’s also now known how roasting affects polyphenol content,” he said.

For his study, Afoakwa separated 300 pods into four different groups: the batches were either not stored, or stored for three, seven or 10 days before going through fermentation and drying.

Turns out, seven days of storage was the sweet spot in yielding the highest levels of antioxidants post-roasting.

READ MORE: Why dark chocolate is good for our gut, heart and taste buds

Next, the researchers wanted to measure how roasting ate away at nutrition levels. Using samples from the four groups, they roasted the beans at the same temperature but at varying times. Currently, cocoa beans are roasted for about 10 to 20 minutes at up to 266 degrees Fahrenheit. For the study, Afoakwa changed the roasting times to 45 minutes at 242 degrees F. This slower roasting at a slightly cooler temperature saved the most antioxidants.

The team in Ghana is hopeful its technique could be adopted across Latin America and Southeast Asia where cocoa beans produce a chocolate with less intense chocolate flavour and have less antioxidants.

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Their full findings will be presented on Tuesday morning at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting. Watch the press conference about the research live at 11 a.m. Mountain Time here.

carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
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