Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Physics of Chocolate
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, we all know you like chocolate, but is
- 0:10Speaker 1: that a personal or a professional interest?
- 0:13Speaker 2: You know, I don't think I know where to draw
- 0:15Speaker 2: the line anymore.
- 0:16Speaker 1: I mean between your personal and professional interests.
- 0:20Speaker 2: Sometimes it's all just a big mush.
- 0:22Speaker 1: Well, you're paid to do physics, but are you paid
- 0:24Speaker 1: to eat chocolate?
- 0:26Speaker 3: No?
- 0:27Speaker 2: I still have to pay for my own chocolate. It's
- 0:29Speaker 2: not yet stocked in the department office supply. I mean,
- 0:32Speaker 2: I've checked.
- 0:33Speaker 1: So chocolate is personal, Lin, It's not necessary to eat
- 0:37Speaker 1: it to do physics.
- 0:39Speaker 2: You know, this is an excellent question, and I'm going
- 0:41Speaker 2: to raise that with my department chair because I think
- 0:43Speaker 2: it is essential.
- 0:44Speaker 1: You're going to get a chocolate chair for your office.
- 0:49Speaker 2: I want my chair dipped in chocolate.
- 0:52Speaker 1: There you go, that's going to be great on your pants.
- 0:57Speaker 2: Who wears pants in their office?
- 0:59Speaker 1: Heyersonal choice man, not a professional one unless they're in
- 1:03Speaker 1: a certain profession.
- 1:05Speaker 2: See, the line can be fuzzy.
- 1:22Speaker 1: Hi, I'm for him, a cartoonist and the author of
- 1:24Speaker 1: Oliver's Great Big Universe.
- 1:26Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
- 1:29Speaker 2: at UC Irvine, and I definitely consume chocolate to do
- 1:32Speaker 2: physics really.
- 1:33Speaker 1: Like, before you sit down to do any math or
- 1:36Speaker 1: work out any physics scenarios or experiments, you have to
- 1:39Speaker 1: eat a bar of chocolate.
- 1:40Speaker 2: No, it's not as tightly corelated as like drinking coffee
- 1:43Speaker 2: to think hard. But you know, I consume a fair
- 1:45Speaker 2: amount of chocolate every week, and I do a fair
- 1:47Speaker 2: amount of physics every week, and so there's definitely some
- 1:49Speaker 2: in out relationship there.
- 1:51Speaker 1: I see there's a correlation, but who knows what the causation.
- 1:54Speaker 2: Is who it could be the physics leads to chocolate
- 1:57Speaker 2: instead of chocolate leads to physics, Like.
- 2:00Speaker 1: The physics is financing your chocolate addiction.
- 2:03Speaker 2: That's definitely true, Yes, that in this podcast.
- 2:07Speaker 1: But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
- 2:09Speaker 1: the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
- 2:12Speaker 2: In which we invite you along on an exploration of
- 2:14Speaker 2: everything in the universe. The black holes, the quantum particles,
- 2:18Speaker 2: the mysterious chocolate habits of physics professors. Everything out there
- 2:22Speaker 2: is up for understanding and therefore grist for explanation.
- 2:26Speaker 1: That's right, because it is a delicious, silky smooth universe
- 2:30Speaker 1: out there, full of mysteries, flavors, and nuances that are
- 2:34Speaker 1: still up for debit and still up for exploration and
- 2:37Speaker 1: asking questions.
- 2:38Speaker 2: And some of the most amazing and mysterious experiences in
- 2:41Speaker 2: our lives do come down to the microscopic science, the
- 2:44Speaker 2: physics or even gasp, the chemistry of your food determines
- 2:49Speaker 2: what it feels like and what it tastes like in
- 2:51Speaker 2: your mouth.
- 2:51Speaker 1: That's right. Science is all around us in the physics
- 2:54Speaker 1: of our presence here on the planet. There's chemistry and
- 2:56Speaker 1: the foods we eat, and there's psychology in things like
- 2:59Speaker 1: chocolate addiction.
- 3:01Speaker 2: Chocolate addiction what I could stop any time?
- 3:04Speaker 1: Sure you can, Dan, Yeah, sure, that's what they all say.
- 3:07Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not going to prove it, but I
- 3:09Speaker 2: know I could.
- 3:10Speaker 1: You're not gonna like it, but you could. You're saying
- 3:12Speaker 1: like you're gonna go into withdrawl and get the shakes,
- 3:17Speaker 1: but uh, you can still do it exactly.
- 3:19Speaker 2: And regular listeners of the podcast might have picked up
- 3:22Speaker 2: on the fact that we're often making jokes about chocolate,
- 3:25Speaker 2: connecting chocolate with physics, connecting physics with chocolate. But I'm
- 3:29Speaker 2: a believer that there's more than just a few jokes
- 3:31Speaker 2: to be had here, that there is a deep connection
- 3:33Speaker 2: between physics and chocolate.
- 3:35Speaker 1: M isn't there a graph you can find online of
- 3:38Speaker 1: like number of Nobel prizes per country versus amount of
- 3:42Speaker 1: chocolate consumed.
- 3:43Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, there is an amazing correlation between the Nobel
- 3:47Speaker 2: prizes per capita and the pounds of dark chocolate consumed
- 3:50Speaker 2: per capita. It's really pretty tight. Switzerland is definitely in
- 3:54Speaker 2: the upper edge of both of those categories.
- 3:57Speaker 1: But of course I could just be a coincidence, right,
- 3:59Speaker 1: because the Swiss love their chocolate, and the Swiss are
- 4:02Speaker 1: the ones that issued the mobile price.
- 4:06Speaker 2: No, those those are the Swedes. Man the Swedes, oh
- 4:09Speaker 2: the sweeze, Oh boy, whoops? But close, I guess kind of.
- 4:12Speaker 2: They're both European.
- 4:14Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go, Central Europe.
- 4:17Speaker 2: I think the Swedes are also up there. So maybe
- 4:20Speaker 2: it's a Swedish Swiss cabal that's behind all of it.
- 4:23Speaker 1: Well, the question then, is is it a correlation or
- 4:26Speaker 1: a causation and in which direction is the causation?
- 4:29Speaker 3: Right?
- 4:29Speaker 4: Yeah?
- 4:29Speaker 2: Or maybe there another confounding factor that fuels them both.
- 4:33Speaker 2: Who knows? One of the deep mysteries of the universe.
- 4:36Speaker 1: Sounds like you're just throwing your hands up in the air. Daniel, Here,
- 4:40Speaker 1: I've embracing the mystery. Should need you apply for a
- 4:43Speaker 1: grant to study this or something?
- 4:44Speaker 2: I think I'm going to go have some chocolate and
- 4:46Speaker 2: think deeply about it.
- 4:47Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go, But how are you going to
- 4:48Speaker 1: pay for that chocolate?
- 4:50Speaker 2: Okay, I'm applying for a grant? Yeah, yeah, there you go.
- 4:53Speaker 1: Applied to the National Snack Foundation the NSF. But yeah,
- 4:58Speaker 1: like you said, there is a chemistry everywhere and physics
- 5:02Speaker 1: within chemistry all around us, even in the foods we eat.
- 5:05Speaker 1: So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the physics
- 5:12Speaker 1: of chocolate.
- 5:13Speaker 2: There's definitely a physics of chocolate in the experience of
- 5:16Speaker 2: eating it, but chocolate also plays other outsized roles in physics.
- 5:21Speaker 2: We use chocolate for analogies all the time. Phyes this.
- 5:24Speaker 2: Definitely eat a lot of chocolate. You can actually even
- 5:27Speaker 2: use chocolate to do physics experiments.
- 5:29Speaker 1: Now, hold on, I feel like you just made a
- 5:31Speaker 1: statement there, which is that all physicists eat a lot
- 5:34Speaker 1: of chocolate. Is that just based on your experiment of
- 5:36Speaker 1: one with yourself, or is there really like a culture
- 5:41Speaker 1: of chocolate within the physics world.
- 5:43Speaker 2: You know, I anticipated you challenging me on this, and
- 5:46Speaker 2: so I did a bit of research. I was able
- 5:49Speaker 2: to dig up how much Americans eat in terms of
- 5:51Speaker 2: chocolate per week. On average, Americans eat three chocolate bars
- 5:56Speaker 2: per week, spending one hundred and twenty billion dollars a
- 5:59Speaker 2: year year on this stuff. But I wasn't able to
- 6:02Speaker 2: find any data on how much chocolate physicists consume. I mean,
- 6:06Speaker 2: I have my own observations. I know the physicists or
- 6:09Speaker 2: lovers of coffee and coffee chocolate often connected, and people
- 6:13Speaker 2: are often having little squares of chocolate when they sit
- 6:16Speaker 2: there coffee. But yes, I will admit at this point
- 6:18Speaker 2: it's basically anecdotal.
- 6:20Speaker 1: I see. So when you said I did some research,
- 6:22Speaker 1: you mean you actually didn't do any research.
- 6:24Speaker 2: I mean I ate some chocolate and I thought about it.
- 6:26Speaker 2: That's research.
- 6:27Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I mean. Did some research with an
- 6:30Speaker 1: end of one, like one data point.
- 6:33Speaker 2: I watched people in my department eating chocolate. That's end
- 6:36Speaker 2: of like five or ten.
- 6:38Speaker 1: Well, you would have to do a controlled experiment like
- 6:41Speaker 1: good at the math department, go to the chemistry department,
- 6:43Speaker 1: go to the sociology department, and then measure the chocolate
- 6:47Speaker 1: consumption per professor.
- 6:48Speaker 2: Yeah, you just outlined my proposal to the National Snack Foundation.
- 6:52Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. Do I get to be a
- 6:54Speaker 1: co author and thus a recipient of the money?
- 6:58Speaker 2: Yeah? Sure, absolutely. If I get money from the National
- 7:01Speaker 2: Snack Foundation, we'll share it for.
- 7:02Speaker 1: This study, all right, But I don't have to use
- 7:04Speaker 1: it buy chocolate to egg or what if I use
- 7:06Speaker 1: it to buy white chocolate, thus canceling out?
- 7:09Speaker 2: Oh god. You know, they have pretty strict controls on
- 7:13Speaker 2: how you spend government money. So as long as you
- 7:15Speaker 2: can stand before Congress and defend that as a valid
- 7:18Speaker 2: way to spend public funds, then hey, let's do it.
- 7:22Speaker 1: Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, well I hear the National Snack
- 7:25Speaker 1: Foundation gets into trouble all the time with that. But yeah,
- 7:29Speaker 1: it's interesting to think about. You know, everything that we
- 7:31Speaker 1: eat basically has chemistry and does physics in it. Right,
- 7:34Speaker 1: there's science and then everything we do and everything we
- 7:37Speaker 1: are and everything we put down our stomachs and everything
- 7:40Speaker 1: that comes out the other head.
- 7:42Speaker 2: That's right, the chocolate that goes in in the dark,
- 7:44Speaker 2: matter that comes out.
- 7:45Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned that there's some experiments you can do
- 7:47Speaker 1: with chocolate. What do you mean by that?
- 7:48Speaker 2: This is sort of famous at home measurement of the
- 7:51Speaker 2: speed of light that you can do using a bar
- 7:54Speaker 2: of chocolate. You take a bar of chocolate and you
- 7:56Speaker 2: put it in the microwave, and you'll notice that certain
- 7:59Speaker 2: spots on it faster than others. Those are because of
- 8:02Speaker 2: the microwaves, which are actually just invisible light waves are
- 8:06Speaker 2: heating some parts of the chocolate more than others because
- 8:09Speaker 2: of the wave like nature of light. So you can
- 8:12Speaker 2: use that to measure the wavelength of the light and
- 8:15Speaker 2: then knowing the frequency already, you can derive the speed
- 8:18Speaker 2: of light. So you can kind of measure the speed
- 8:21Speaker 2: of light using chocolate and a microwave.
- 8:23Speaker 1: Wait, what is this like a real experiment you can do.
- 8:26Speaker 2: This is a real experiment you can do. You can
- 8:27Speaker 2: google it and find instructions online. You put the microwave
- 8:31Speaker 2: in the chocolate and you'll notice some melty spots here
- 8:34Speaker 2: and there. Measure the distance between them, and you get
- 8:36Speaker 2: basically the wavelength of the microwaves. You can convert that
- 8:41Speaker 2: into the speed of light.
- 8:42Speaker 1: But do you have to disable the rotating table?
- 8:44Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, you can't let it rotate.
- 8:46Speaker 1: And thankfully you don't need a chocolate for these you
- 8:48Speaker 1: can use butter or maybe wax.
- 8:51Speaker 2: Right, No, you need to do chocolate. Oh, you're absolutely right.
- 8:56Speaker 2: You don't need chocolate. It's just kind of fun.
- 8:59Speaker 1: You just can do it chocolate.
- 9:00Speaker 2: Well, at the end of the chocolate version experiment, you
- 9:03Speaker 2: have a nice, warm, melti bar of chocolate. The end
- 9:05Speaker 2: of the wax version, you don't have any snacks.
- 9:07Speaker 1: Mm, but you only have a few warm pools of chocolate.
- 9:11Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly right.
- 9:13Speaker 1: You have a pattern of melted chocolate. All right, Well,
- 9:16Speaker 1: what are we doing in this episode? We're talking about
- 9:18Speaker 1: the physics of chocolate, the signs behind chocolate.
- 9:21Speaker 2: We're going to do both. We are going to talk
- 9:23Speaker 2: to an ex physicist who has done a deep dive
- 9:26Speaker 2: on the process of chocolate, reading research papers and going
- 9:30Speaker 2: from dirt to bar, growing his own chocolate pods and
- 9:34Speaker 2: making his own chocolate bar in his lab, and also
- 9:38Speaker 2: talk to experts in commercial production of chocolate. What are
- 9:41Speaker 2: the tricky bits of the process, what's hard about making
- 9:44Speaker 2: an eminem taste the same all the world around? And
- 9:47Speaker 2: why does Hershey's have that particular kind of flavor?
- 9:50Speaker 3: Mmm?
- 9:51Speaker 1: Interesting? All right, Well, let's take a big dip into
- 9:53Speaker 1: this fondue of Chocolate Physics, starting with Daniel's interview with
- 9:58Speaker 1: ex physicist Seamus Likely.
- 10:03Speaker 2: Seamus grew up in New Mexico as I did, has
- 10:06Speaker 2: a PhD in particle physics like I do, worked at
- 10:09Speaker 2: Formulab just like I did, and there are stories diverge.
- 10:13Speaker 2: He went off into an industry where he created the Xbox,
- 10:16Speaker 2: and more recently he's been well known online for scraping
- 10:19Speaker 2: the insides of ancient Egyptian vessels to cultivate yeast and
- 10:23Speaker 2: bake ancient bread. Okay, so then it's my great pleasure
- 10:27Speaker 2: to welcome the podcast the Infamous, the one and only
- 10:31Speaker 2: Seamus Blackly. Seamus, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks
- 10:34Speaker 2: for having me man. You know, I wanted to give
- 10:36Speaker 2: an introduction to the listeners, had an idea of who
- 10:39Speaker 2: we were talking to here, but it was just such
- 10:40Speaker 2: an overwhelming process to try to sketch your background. It's
- 10:45Speaker 2: really incredible. So can you give us like a brief
- 10:47Speaker 2: summary of how you got to here today to a
- 10:50Speaker 2: place where we're talking about nerding out about chocolate details.
- 10:55Speaker 5: You know, people always say that now when they're talking
- 11:00Speaker 5: to me or trying to introduce me at things and
- 11:02Speaker 5: It's confusing to me because from my standpoint, you know,
- 11:07Speaker 5: I'm bored all the time, and so none of this
- 11:09Speaker 5: seems very interesting to.
- 11:11Speaker 4: Me at all.
- 11:12Speaker 5: But perhaps that's why I have had the good luck
- 11:17Speaker 5: to do all sorts of different things, because I guess
- 11:21Speaker 5: I get bored very easily, and I'm very interested in
- 11:24Speaker 5: how everything works. But the long and short of it,
- 11:28Speaker 5: and I think specifically from the standpoint of you know,
- 11:31Speaker 5: the most important thing we share in common, which is physics,
- 11:35Speaker 5: is that I grew up in New Mexico. I thought
- 11:42Speaker 5: I was going to be a musician, and at some
- 11:46Speaker 5: point I realized that all of the jazz piano guys,
- 11:51Speaker 5: which is what I was, who were really respected, who
- 11:57Speaker 5: played the best, were like still living with their mothers
- 12:01Speaker 5: when they were in their forties.
- 12:03Speaker 4: And that was cool.
- 12:04Speaker 5: I mean, there were really amazing people, and I don't
- 12:07Speaker 5: mean to cast dispersions on them, but I realized that
- 12:09Speaker 5: I couldn't do that, and so I had to figure
- 12:12Speaker 5: out something else to do. And it turned out at
- 12:16Speaker 5: that point I was an undergraduate and I had burned
- 12:18Speaker 5: through two years, and I had to find something else
- 12:22Speaker 5: that I could study that might make me some money.
- 12:24Speaker 5: And I guess the idea that physics would be a
- 12:27Speaker 5: career that would make you money. I mean, yeah, sure,
- 12:31Speaker 5: but probably more than jazz piano at the time. And well,
- 12:36Speaker 5: the only majors available you could do in two years
- 12:38Speaker 5: without some kind of maze of prerequisites that would be
- 12:40Speaker 5: impossible were basically physics and math at the time, and
- 12:46Speaker 5: the physics department at Tufts I went to school was
- 12:50Speaker 5: filled with all of these really cool guys doing experimental
- 12:54Speaker 5: hyenergy physics and phenomenologists and a couple of theorists. And
- 12:58Speaker 5: they were all like Vietnam draft who went into physics
- 13:01Speaker 5: to go to graduate school and.
- 13:02Speaker 4: Not go to Vietnam.
- 13:03Speaker 5: And they were, you know, like touching the face of
- 13:06Speaker 5: God to be frank, I mean, they were trying to
- 13:08Speaker 5: understand the fundamental nature of the universe. And in my mind,
- 13:14Speaker 5: the work felt the same as jazz, and I just
- 13:18Speaker 5: kind of stepped through that door and was suddenly, you know,
- 13:24Speaker 5: at formula.
- 13:26Speaker 2: It's fascinating to me that you grew up in northern
- 13:28Speaker 2: New Mexico near two national labs, but didn't really discover
- 13:32Speaker 2: your passion for physics until you left and went to Boston.
- 13:35Speaker 5: Well, yeah, and I had interestingly you know, in high
- 13:40Speaker 5: school has really focused on music and you know, musical
- 13:45Speaker 5: theater and all this stuff. So yeah, and I think
- 13:49Speaker 5: that the nature of New Mexico as being such an
- 13:52Speaker 5: incredibly bizarre, fascinating, beautiful, creative and technical place was hot
- 14:00Speaker 5: and all of this for me in any case, So
- 14:03Speaker 5: I go to Framer Lab and you know, I'm setting
- 14:06Speaker 5: up postdocs, and I go to graduate school and I
- 14:11Speaker 5: find something in the Magnet Accelerator Physics group for the
- 14:16Speaker 5: super Condutting SuperCollider that looks great. And then Congress cancels
- 14:20Speaker 5: the SuperCollider, and there's a big politics thing around the
- 14:24Speaker 5: top Quark, and all these things sort of combined together
- 14:27Speaker 5: to cause me to be very unhappy, and so I
- 14:32Speaker 5: bailed out and went and took a job designing airplanes
- 14:37Speaker 5: that didn't quite materialize. So I had a temporary job
- 14:43Speaker 5: doing a thing nobody had ever heard of before, which
- 14:45Speaker 5: was writing physics for video games, which was not even
- 14:50Speaker 5: a thing. And suddenly I was in the video game business,
- 14:54Speaker 5: and you know, it was so exciting and wonderful to
- 14:58Speaker 5: be around, work with the people and contributing to the
- 15:03Speaker 5: beginnings of what is now you know, video games like
- 15:07Speaker 5: three dimensional video games and three D rendering. Yeah, and
- 15:10Speaker 5: you know, like my variable names and the stuff are
- 15:13Speaker 5: still used in all those engines because I was just
- 15:16Speaker 5: around at the right time, like a guy looking for
- 15:18Speaker 5: the men's room, right who walks in the wrong room,
- 15:21Speaker 5: and then that's where I was.
- 15:25Speaker 2: And well certainly right place, right time, with the right
- 15:27Speaker 2: skills as well.
- 15:28Speaker 5: I mean, it was still fairly awkward to tell people
- 15:32Speaker 5: you worked in video games, because it hadn't occurred to
- 15:35Speaker 5: most people yet that video games were made by people.
- 15:38Speaker 5: I mean, it sounds odd, but it's not like it
- 15:42Speaker 5: is now. So so I did that for a long
- 15:44Speaker 5: time and that led to me trying to make a
- 15:50Speaker 5: big magnum opus game at a new company called DreamWorks,
- 15:53Speaker 5: where I was like, you know, the eightieth employee or something,
- 15:57Speaker 5: and you know, just biting off more and I could
- 16:00Speaker 5: chew and failing at that, you know, and I worked
- 16:03Speaker 5: for Steven Spielberg and I knew all these guys, and again,
- 16:07Speaker 5: you know, the typical for me, I was just sort
- 16:09Speaker 5: of walking through this place thinking, wow, okay, of course
- 16:12Speaker 5: everybody hangs out with Steven Spielberg, and it wasn't really
- 16:15Speaker 5: you know, the work you're doing this is such a
- 16:18Speaker 5: physicist thing, like the work you're doing is so hard
- 16:20Speaker 5: that everything else kind of seems peripheral and it's not
- 16:25Speaker 5: like you're sleepwalking. But I know it's really aggravating for
- 16:27Speaker 5: people around you because they don't see the thing in
- 16:33Speaker 5: your mind that you're working on. They don't see the
- 16:37Speaker 5: kind of you know, infinite landscape of thought that you
- 16:40Speaker 5: have going on.
- 16:41Speaker 4: All the time.
- 16:41Speaker 5: So you just seem like a space kit it and
- 16:43Speaker 5: you're not paying attention. But it's quite the opposite, right,
- 16:45Speaker 5: So that's what Games was like then, because we were
- 16:47Speaker 5: figuring out, hey, what is a renderer? Like what like,
- 16:50Speaker 5: how do you how would you what when you go
- 16:52Speaker 5: through a door? How do you deal with that in memory?
- 16:55Speaker 5: Because we have four megabytes and you know this kind
- 16:58Speaker 5: of stuff. And anyway, my big game there failed because
- 17:03Speaker 5: I was, you know, working with a bunch of movie
- 17:06Speaker 5: people who didn't get it, and I was, you know,
- 17:07Speaker 5: twenty seven or twenty eight or something, and I feel
- 17:10Speaker 5: like I probably wasn't even toilet trained, you know, I
- 17:13Speaker 5: was really so young. And that huge failure led to
- 17:16Speaker 5: me going to try to hide out at Microsoft because
- 17:19Speaker 5: I had met Bill Gates again. Sleepwalking through all this stuff.
- 17:22Speaker 5: And he had said, based on some of the physics
- 17:24Speaker 5: demos that he saw that we were doing, and you know,
- 17:28Speaker 5: locomotion physics that we'd done with dinosaurs and humans and
- 17:32Speaker 5: all this, that I should come work at Microsoft someday.
- 17:35Speaker 5: And so I sort of sheepishly mailed him, and then
- 17:38Speaker 5: I ended up working at Microsoft. And then couldn't help
- 17:42Speaker 5: myself when I realized that Microsoft could you know, could
- 17:47Speaker 5: make a game console that could beat Sony and et cetera,
- 17:51Speaker 5: et cetera. So I just keep on, you know, looking
- 17:54Speaker 5: at seeing interesting stuff to work on, and I, for
- 17:59Speaker 5: some reason, don't have the common sense that most people
- 18:02Speaker 5: have about well that's really stupid. You're gonna lose your house.
- 18:07Speaker 5: I just go ahead and do it anyway. So there
- 18:10Speaker 5: you go. And so now we end up with you know,
- 18:14Speaker 5: me doing you know, another secret project that I can't
- 18:19Speaker 5: tell you about right now, and and and a lot
- 18:22Speaker 5: of hobby.
- 18:22Speaker 4: Projects that I talk about.
- 18:23Speaker 5: A lot, like the ancient Egyptian bakery, which I believe
- 18:28Speaker 5: it or not, you know, we're now I think going to.
- 18:31Speaker 4: Build in Cairo, and this chocolate stuff.
- 18:36Speaker 2: Well, you know, I talk a lot in the podcast
- 18:37Speaker 2: about teaching people to think like a physicist, you know,
- 18:40Speaker 2: which is not to use your common sense, but to
- 18:43Speaker 2: follow your curiosity and your intuition and try to make
- 18:45Speaker 2: sense of the world and to you know, think differently.
- 18:47Speaker 2: And I think that's something we definitely should cultivate. And
- 18:51Speaker 2: so maybe you're training as a physicist is what helped
- 18:53Speaker 2: you follow your curiosity and end up in all these
- 18:56Speaker 2: exciting adventures.
- 18:57Speaker 5: This is I think probably universally true about all him
- 19:00Speaker 5: and endeavor has come from someone following that curiosity and
- 19:07Speaker 5: and doing as Penduleete says, you know, an amount of
- 19:10Speaker 5: work on something that most people would consider insane, right,
- 19:14Speaker 5: you know, he says, that's what magic is, right, Magic
- 19:17Speaker 5: is somebody working on something, you know, in a way
- 19:20Speaker 5: that most people will consider to be insane. But that's
- 19:24Speaker 5: truly what like everything, all human progress, like every story
- 19:27Speaker 5: you read about anything important, beautiful, world changing, you know,
- 19:32Speaker 5: always has an element of an individual or group of
- 19:35Speaker 5: individuals who are working on it despite all indications that
- 19:39Speaker 5: it's insane, and following that. And I think that within
- 19:43Speaker 5: physics we need more of that because sometimes you get
- 19:48Speaker 5: to see a secret, and you're not going to see
- 19:53Speaker 5: that secret unless you open yourself to being compelled to
- 19:59Speaker 5: just follow in that curiosity despite every practical concern And
- 20:05Speaker 5: it's weird because you are a physical being. You have
- 20:07Speaker 5: to have practical concerns. You have to eat, you have
- 20:09Speaker 5: to have relationships. You know, you don't want to have
- 20:13Speaker 5: like Fiman's second wife's divorce papers saying all he thinks
- 20:18Speaker 5: about is calculus. But also, I mean all I think
- 20:24Speaker 5: about is calculus. I mean that's like, it's just how
- 20:26Speaker 5: it is because sometimes you know, it turns up a
- 20:30Speaker 5: gold nugget, man, So that's so important. It's really, really,
- 20:35Speaker 5: really important. And I mean to get back around a
- 20:38Speaker 5: chocolate That's where the chocolate comes from, is the musing
- 20:43Speaker 5: of how strange is it that dirt can produce this
- 20:49Speaker 5: chocolate bar? And you know, could we do that? We
- 20:51Speaker 5: could try. Let's try. Let's see what it's like, because
- 20:57Speaker 5: it'll just be a thing we do in the background.
- 20:58Speaker 5: I will take years for the tree to let's just
- 21:00Speaker 5: see if we cannot kill the tree.
- 21:02Speaker 2: But why chocolate specifically, I mean, were you're trying to
- 21:05Speaker 2: develop a useful skill so you can create something valuable
- 21:08Speaker 2: in the end times or do you think that's a
- 21:10Speaker 2: deep physics chocolate connection it's chocolate. What else do you need?
- 21:13Speaker 2: I mean, all right, so let's get to chocolate. Then
- 21:16Speaker 2: can you walk us through the process, because I know
- 21:18Speaker 2: you did a deep dive into the research of how
- 21:21Speaker 2: to go from dirt to bar. Walk us through every
- 21:24Speaker 2: stage of the process of how you grow this thing,
- 21:26Speaker 2: how you ferment it, how you roasted. What are all
- 21:29Speaker 2: the secrets there that humanity has slowly discovered over thousands
- 21:33Speaker 2: of years.
- 21:33Speaker 5: It's impressive, kind of in the same vein as coffee.
- 21:37Speaker 5: And I was thinking about coffee because I did grow
- 21:40Speaker 5: coffee also years ago, and it's just so interesting that
- 21:47Speaker 5: we would, you know, cultivate these plants because they had
- 21:50Speaker 5: a stimulant in them, and everybody knew that a stimulant.
- 21:52Speaker 5: So it's like tea. You cultivate these plants and they
- 21:55Speaker 5: make these little red berries. I don't know if you've
- 21:57Speaker 5: ever seen coffee berries on a tree. And then you
- 22:01Speaker 5: harvest them when they're red, and then you throw away
- 22:03Speaker 5: the fruit and you keep the seed okay, fair enough,
- 22:07Speaker 5: and then you dry the seeds, and then you roast
- 22:10Speaker 5: the seeds, and then you grind the seeds, and then
- 22:14Speaker 5: you boil the seeds, and then you also throw the
- 22:18Speaker 5: seeds away and you drink the water. That's insane. Nobody
- 22:22Speaker 5: would think of that, And so there's some kind of
- 22:24Speaker 5: evolutionary process in there that's very lucky. And part of
- 22:29Speaker 5: what you wonder is if that is the optimal way
- 22:31Speaker 5: to enjoy the coffee bean or not, or if it's
- 22:35Speaker 5: merely habitual. And you know, there are many coffee traditions,
- 22:40Speaker 5: but they all basically follow that same extraction principle. And
- 22:43Speaker 5: it is a biological extraction, right, I mean, it's a
- 22:46Speaker 5: biology lab kind of a process, but the biology lab
- 22:49Speaker 5: process probably came from people understanding that type of extraction
- 22:53Speaker 5: and applying it elsewhere. So the question is how it
- 22:56Speaker 5: fits together, and that's a little bit of the motivation
- 22:59Speaker 5: or chocolate. So, as I said, in my lab, we
- 23:03Speaker 5: have space and temperature control and some humidity from a
- 23:08Speaker 5: water jetta, a machine that cuts difficult stuff using high
- 23:12Speaker 5: pressure water. It has a big water tank and so
- 23:15Speaker 5: there's always a kind of a humid environment around it.
- 23:18Speaker 5: So we had accidentally grown some plants around it just
- 23:22Speaker 5: for some cheer, or actually we had a contest to
- 23:25Speaker 5: see how big a tomato plant we could grow. And
- 23:28Speaker 5: in this environment, this little tomato ceiling in six or
- 23:32Speaker 5: seven months, you know, grew like twenty five feet to
- 23:36Speaker 5: the ceiling and was winding out onto the ceiling. So
- 23:38Speaker 5: we thought, all right, well, this is a great growing environment.
- 23:40Speaker 5: What's the most interesting thing we could grow? And you know,
- 23:44Speaker 5: chocolate is probably the weirdest and most interesting thing you
- 23:47Speaker 5: could grow, because I don't think intuitively, at least for me,
- 23:52Speaker 5: I didn't think about chocolate as being a plant, you know,
- 23:56Speaker 5: what is it as a petroleum product?
- 23:58Speaker 4: Like what does it come from?
- 24:00Speaker 5: And so we you know, got some seeds and planted
- 24:04Speaker 5: them and they sprouted, and then we had a few
- 24:07Speaker 5: years of you know, just happily, you know, figuring out
- 24:10Speaker 5: how to not kill them, and you know it had
- 24:13Speaker 5: to do with soil acidity and such, and there are
- 24:15Speaker 5: papers you can read. So we kind of, you know,
- 24:17Speaker 5: did the classic nerd thing, which is to look to
- 24:20Speaker 5: the literature. And it's kind of scant for for cacaw
- 24:26Speaker 5: and chocolate actually, And part of that is because the
- 24:30Speaker 5: industry could be kind of kind of secretive, like a
- 24:32Speaker 5: lot of industries. And part of it is because in
- 24:35Speaker 5: the places where cocaw grows, it's kind of weed like,
- 24:38Speaker 5: and so the idea of you know, nutrition of cacao
- 24:43Speaker 5: plants is you know, an absurd kind of a study,
- 24:47Speaker 5: given the fact that the chocolate industry is real problem
- 24:50Speaker 5: is like child slavery. So and the reason there's child
- 24:54Speaker 5: slavery is the plants grow around anywhere, and so the
- 24:59Speaker 5: economics are around harvesting and moving the product around, not
- 25:03Speaker 5: around optimizing for growth. Anyway, we're nerd, so we're optimizing
- 25:07Speaker 5: for growth. And we got these beautiful trees and they
- 25:10Speaker 5: started to flower, and we're thinking, all right, well, we
- 25:14Speaker 5: have no idea if these things are self fertile or not,
- 25:17Speaker 5: you know, and these are indoors, so we're not going
- 25:19Speaker 5: to introduce a bunch of you know, pollinators in here,
- 25:21Speaker 5: so let's hope. So we waited a really long time
- 25:25Speaker 5: and yeah, they're not self fertile. And we you know,
- 25:27Speaker 5: we have a day job too and other projects.
- 25:29Speaker 2: So meaning that you're wondering if like one flower can
- 25:33Speaker 2: fertilize another flower, or if you need a whole separate
- 25:35Speaker 2: plant to have some basically cacao secs.
- 25:38Speaker 5: We have microbiologists and other people with a background of
- 25:41Speaker 5: biology in our staff, so there was a time, you know,
- 25:44Speaker 5: there was some debate about this at lunchtime, and then
- 25:46Speaker 5: finally we looked up the literature and realized that not
- 25:49Speaker 5: only are they not self fertile, but they need to
- 25:52Speaker 5: be fertilized by trees that are preferably, you know, somewhat
- 25:58Speaker 5: genetically distant from themselves. And the preferred pollinator is a
- 26:02Speaker 5: certain kind of biting gnat that lives only in these
- 26:06Speaker 5: environments where the trees come from. And so that was
- 26:10Speaker 5: not good news. So we then started a program of
- 26:15Speaker 5: learning how to pollinate these things by hand.
- 26:19Speaker 2: You couldn't just go on like cacou tinder and look
- 26:21Speaker 2: up a matching tree, you know, put them on a
- 26:23Speaker 2: date and to hope it works out.
- 26:25Speaker 5: Unfortunately, that's not not there yet. But it's a good
- 26:28Speaker 5: business idea for your game, So go for that.
- 26:31Speaker 2: That's my next side project.
- 26:33Speaker 5: But you know, interestingly, if you if you if you
- 26:35Speaker 5: actually look up online, there's a there's not a lot
- 26:37Speaker 5: of information that's particularly helpful if you actually have trees
- 26:41Speaker 5: and you don't know what to do with them, because
- 26:42Speaker 5: everybody who has trees already knows what to do with them,
- 26:44Speaker 5: which is just leave them and their fruit appears. You know,
- 26:47Speaker 5: we feel like we're the only people in the world
- 26:49Speaker 5: who like have these trees without the pollinator around. Okay,
- 26:53Speaker 5: so we, you know, get out microscopes and the electron
- 26:58Speaker 5: microscope and we start looking at the in and the
- 27:01Speaker 5: different parts of the structures in the in the flowers.
- 27:04Speaker 5: We have three trees now because we know we need
- 27:08Speaker 5: genetic diversity. The flowers are slightly different. We identify the parts.
- 27:12Speaker 5: We tried different strategies and schedules for pollination, and we
- 27:16Speaker 5: start getting flowers that that will create fruit. We start
- 27:21Speaker 5: we get a little fruit and then the fruit falls off,
- 27:24Speaker 5: and we learn a little bit more about when to pollinate.
- 27:27Speaker 5: We learn a little bit more about about care and feeding,
- 27:32Speaker 5: and we get fruit that sticks. And now we have
- 27:35Speaker 5: a bunch of pods growing on trees, and we realize
- 27:41Speaker 5: we have another problem, which is that we have no
- 27:43Speaker 5: idea what to do next. You know, how do you
- 27:48Speaker 5: know when these things are ripe?
- 27:50Speaker 4: What do you do?
- 27:52Speaker 5: And so again, you know, you look to the internet
- 27:54Speaker 5: and there's really you know, there's a lot of information
- 27:56Speaker 5: that plenty of people take a tour of a of
- 27:59Speaker 5: a cacao arm and see the fermentation and the drawing
- 28:02Speaker 5: and all these things, and there are lots of videos
- 28:04Speaker 5: like you know, like travel promo videos or like you know,
- 28:08Speaker 5: Starbucks promotional type videos of like you know, the the
- 28:12Speaker 5: cute indigenous people like you know, mixing the beans with
- 28:16Speaker 5: their feet in all this, but there's nothing like, here's
- 28:20Speaker 5: a fermentation schedule. So again we looked at the literature
- 28:24Speaker 5: and discover again, you know, not as much as you
- 28:27Speaker 5: would want, but there are some good studies of cacao fermentation,
- 28:31Speaker 5: which seems like the most relevant next thing.
- 28:35Speaker 4: We need to learn.
- 28:35Speaker 5: Unfortunately, fermentation is something that I know a great deal
- 28:38Speaker 5: about from all of the you know, ancient bread projects
- 28:42Speaker 5: and other types of wild beast collection and stuff.
- 28:45Speaker 2: I mean, fermentation is basically helpful rotting, right, It's like
- 28:49Speaker 2: microbial processing of your gunk into other kinds of gunk.
- 28:53Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's it's nanomachinery at your command. And so
- 28:58Speaker 5: it's primarily a yeast fermentation that then becomes a bacterial fermentation.
- 29:03Speaker 5: You can tell because of the temperature profile and timing
- 29:07Speaker 5: and the the off gassing that happens during cow fermentation.
- 29:13Speaker 5: And it's really an art form more than a science.
- 29:16Speaker 5: It's been studied some, but all the papers are from
- 29:19Speaker 5: you know, agriculture research stations, and so they're not really
- 29:23Speaker 5: you know, it's not the kind of paper that you
- 29:25Speaker 5: would look at and think this is really good, well
- 29:27Speaker 5: controlled data. But it's enough of a hint that we
- 29:30Speaker 5: felt we could figure it out, and so we did
- 29:32Speaker 5: a couple of things.
- 29:33Speaker 2: But I think it's worth pausing there and noting like
- 29:35Speaker 2: a lot of this knowledge obviously wasn't developed using what
- 29:38Speaker 2: we would consider to be modern scientific empirical studies. Right,
- 29:42Speaker 2: It's like thousands of years of people accidentally doing stuff
- 29:46Speaker 2: and discovering, oh look what happens. Right, this is like
- 29:48Speaker 2: a random walk through through possibility space.
- 29:51Speaker 5: Yeah, And look, I mean I think this is the
- 29:53Speaker 5: perfect example of the mind of a physicist in the
- 29:57Speaker 5: sense that you know, this is really a deeply kind
- 30:00Speaker 5: of artfull thing with a lot of feel in it,
- 30:05Speaker 5: and if you're going to bring a scientific process to it,
- 30:10Speaker 5: you need to bring that scientific process to it in
- 30:14Speaker 5: an open way, in a way where you're paying attention
- 30:16Speaker 5: to what's going on. And I think that this is
- 30:18Speaker 5: really the difference between like physics and engineering is like,
- 30:22Speaker 5: you know, I have a book project that's given me
- 30:24Speaker 5: the opportunity or the excuse to read you know, like
- 30:29Speaker 5: all of Heisenberg's papers and and Rutherford and you know
- 30:34Speaker 5: in his lab and you know, finding the neutron and
- 30:38Speaker 5: the thought process that those guys had. It's it's the
- 30:42Speaker 5: perfect analogy here. It's that you know, you cannot overpower this,
- 30:47Speaker 5: you cannot brute force this. They didn't have the equipment
- 30:52Speaker 5: to do that. So they had to just pay attention.
- 30:55Speaker 5: They had to surf along with nature. They had to
- 30:57Speaker 5: see what she would give up. Very careful, very aughtful.
- 31:01Speaker 5: And the rigor of your process isn't about like a
- 31:06Speaker 5: scorched earth colonization of ideas into engineering principles to be
- 31:10Speaker 5: put into a book. The rigor of your approach is
- 31:14Speaker 5: your own discipline in listening well and really seeing what's
- 31:18Speaker 5: happening right, and then that can give you a useful
- 31:21Speaker 5: tool and model that you can use then to understand
- 31:24Speaker 5: and then to predict perhaps. So that's what we tried
- 31:27Speaker 5: to do. You know, all of these people who talk
- 31:30Speaker 5: about being to bar and all of these chocolate people
- 31:33Speaker 5: who you know have their artisanal chocolate and curated blah
- 31:37Speaker 5: blah blah, assaulted carmel thing, you know, are buying cacabeans
- 31:43Speaker 5: from somewhere most of the time already dried and fermented,
- 31:48Speaker 5: and then talking about how they've made chocolate from scratch,
- 31:52Speaker 5: and that's not chocolate from scratch. We were making chocolate
- 31:55Speaker 5: from scratch and it was pretty hard. So we did it,
- 32:00Speaker 5: and it was a lot of work, and it was
- 32:03Speaker 5: really satisfying. And the best part is that, unlike when
- 32:08Speaker 5: you spend weeks, you know, solving some horrible partial differential
- 32:13Speaker 5: equation that gives you a part of a result that
- 32:16Speaker 5: you thought you needed but turns out not to be
- 32:18Speaker 5: what you wanted, but you still feel a sense of
- 32:19Speaker 5: soul and pride that you did it, and you can
- 32:22Speaker 5: only share it with yourself and two colleagues who can understand.
- 32:25Speaker 5: When you make chocolate, everybody's happy.
- 32:29Speaker 2: Okay, we have so much more chocolate and physics to
- 32:31Speaker 2: talk about it, but first we have to take a
- 32:33Speaker 2: quick break. Okay, we're back, and I'm talking to Seamus Blackley,
- 32:50Speaker 2: ex particle physicist, X inventor of the Xbox, current grower
- 32:54Speaker 2: of bread from ancient yeast, and CEO of a secretive
- 32:57Speaker 2: tech startup. And I'm talking to him because he has
- 33:00Speaker 2: made chocolate from dirt to bar. I want to hear
- 33:03Speaker 2: all the details, like you grow it, you harvest it,
- 33:06Speaker 2: you ferment it, you dry it, you roast it. Now
- 33:09Speaker 2: you have the nibs. How do you go from the
- 33:11Speaker 2: nibs to the actual bar.
- 33:13Speaker 5: You buy a sea, or you find a seed, you
- 33:16Speaker 5: plant it, it grows a tree. You raise the tree, well,
- 33:20Speaker 5: you pollinate it. Pods appear. Interestingly, the pods on cacao
- 33:25Speaker 5: trees grow off of the trunk, not off the branches,
- 33:27Speaker 5: so it looks a little bit alien. And the pods
- 33:30Speaker 5: themselves actually look a little bit invasion of the body snatchers,
- 33:32Speaker 5: which is cool. When they're mature, they turn these beautiful
- 33:37Speaker 5: fall leaf colors, like it's the very new England of them,
- 33:40Speaker 5: Like these deep yellows and oranges and reds, very beautiful.
- 33:45Speaker 5: And you cut them off and you split them open,
- 33:47Speaker 5: and inside are these seeds that are covered in a
- 33:52Speaker 5: white pulp. And it's delicious. It smells like leachy fruit.
- 33:55Speaker 5: It's very fresh, very fragrant, and it tastes really good.
- 33:58Speaker 5: But the beans themselves are them very bitter, and it
- 34:01Speaker 5: tastes nothing like chocolate. There isn't a hint of chocolate
- 34:05Speaker 5: in any of the flavor profiles of any of this, okay.
- 34:08Speaker 5: The pods have a very planty smell, okay, very very fragrant,
- 34:15Speaker 5: like fresh cut grass, and the pulp has a kind
- 34:21Speaker 5: of a stringent but very pleasant, slightly sweet, light chy flavor.
- 34:27Speaker 5: And the beans are sort of these like purple bitter
- 34:33Speaker 5: soft seeds. And so when you hold this in your hand,
- 34:39Speaker 5: you think, how the hell does this become chocolate? Right,
- 34:44Speaker 5: So the next step is to ferment them. And to
- 34:48Speaker 5: do this, the beans are put into piles for thermal
- 34:53Speaker 5: purposes so that the heat of fermentation can build up,
- 34:56Speaker 5: which accelerates fermentation. And they have to be covered with
- 35:00Speaker 5: something that prevents moisture from escaping, because they require a
- 35:05Speaker 5: moist environment to ferment. And so we crew I have
- 35:09Speaker 5: plenty of fermentors that do excellent temperature control, so we
- 35:13Speaker 5: set up some fermentors with different piles. And in the
- 35:17Speaker 5: literature there are people in the industry who errate their piles,
- 35:23Speaker 5: who mix their piles, who don't touch them. There are
- 35:26Speaker 5: different varieties of cacao. We now know which variety we have,
- 35:30Speaker 5: but we didn't at the time. So the fermentation profiles
- 35:34Speaker 5: are apparently different between like let's say a creole, which
- 35:37Speaker 5: is one variety in.
- 35:38Speaker 4: A front taro, which is a different variety.
- 35:41Speaker 5: But fundamentally what happens is a yeast regular you know, sacrimics.
- 35:49Speaker 5: Yeast fermentation takes place and that creates a certain temperature profile.
- 35:56Speaker 5: So let's say the fermentor is running at eighty five
- 35:58Speaker 5: degrees and height. It will then go up to ninety
- 36:03Speaker 5: five or ninety eight degrees fahrenheit because of the heat
- 36:06Speaker 5: induced by the mechanical action of fermentation itself. The biological
- 36:10Speaker 5: action that will then fall off and you can smell
- 36:15Speaker 5: as you you know, as one does is going to
- 36:18Speaker 5: measure the temperature of your cockau fermentation piles. You can
- 36:21Speaker 5: smell a strong yeast nut, so you get a ready
- 36:24Speaker 5: note out of it, and the temperature will drop and
- 36:28Speaker 5: then it will rise again as the bacteria that are
- 36:35Speaker 5: symbiotic with those yeasts begin their fermentation process, and they
- 36:40Speaker 5: are an acid producing bacteria actually similar to the bacteria
- 36:44Speaker 5: that make acetic acid, and probably identical in many cases,
- 36:49Speaker 5: and you can smell that ascetic smell as you do
- 36:53Speaker 5: your temperature checks and potentially your rotations. There's a second
- 36:57Speaker 5: spike in temperature and then that goes down and this
- 37:01Speaker 5: takes anywhere from five to seven days, and you want
- 37:04Speaker 5: to be very careful because once that bacterial action ceases,
- 37:09Speaker 5: you're in danger of a mold step, which comes afterward
- 37:13Speaker 5: as the mold is no longer deterred in its growth
- 37:17Speaker 5: because of the action of the other organisms.
- 37:20Speaker 4: Right.
- 37:21Speaker 5: So, like in a lot of fermented foods, the preservation
- 37:23Speaker 5: comes from biological competition, not from sterility. So you know
- 37:29Speaker 5: in most fermented foods, or like in your starter for
- 37:34Speaker 5: your sourdough, the reason that it doesn't go bad right
- 37:37Speaker 5: away is because there's so much you know, bacterial action
- 37:41Speaker 5: from the yeast in bacteria in your starter that no
- 37:44Speaker 5: other organisms can compete, and that keeps it sterile. Okay,
- 37:49Speaker 5: So the same thing is happening in the cacao. You
- 37:51Speaker 5: don't want to let it go too long. But during
- 37:54Speaker 5: the end of that bacterial fermentation phase, and this is
- 37:59Speaker 5: the craziest thing in the universe, it starts to smell
- 38:05Speaker 5: like brownies.
- 38:06Speaker 2: Wow, that's when the chocolate comes back.
- 38:07Speaker 5: So it goes from and I was not prepared for this,
- 38:12Speaker 5: and you can't read about this apparently, you know. I
- 38:16Speaker 5: have one of my son's best friends is from Trinidad,
- 38:22Speaker 5: and while I was doing this. He visited with my
- 38:26Speaker 5: son from from college and I was doing this fermentation
- 38:30Speaker 5: and he looked over and he's like, oh, you for
- 38:33Speaker 5: men and chocolate. Cool, because of course he'd seen this
- 38:36Speaker 5: his whole life, right, But for me, I was unprepared
- 38:40Speaker 5: for this transformation to take place. And it really smells
- 38:44Speaker 5: just like brownies. So it's gone from this very sort
- 38:49Speaker 5: of like grassy pod, light y, bitter thing to smelling
- 38:57Speaker 5: like bread to smelling like vinegar, and one day you
- 39:01Speaker 5: open the fermenter and it smells like brownies.
- 39:04Speaker 4: It's insane.
- 39:06Speaker 2: Makes me wonder who the first human was to experience that,
- 39:09Speaker 2: you know, thousands of years ago.
- 39:10Speaker 5: One experiment that I will do shortly is to just
- 39:14Speaker 5: leave some cocow pods around and to see if I
- 39:18Speaker 5: let them ferment internally. If I crack them open, at
- 39:20Speaker 5: some point they smell like chocolate. You can imagine that
- 39:25Speaker 5: somebody happens upon one that's sat for the right amount
- 39:27Speaker 5: of time and it's delicious smelling, right, it might occur
- 39:32Speaker 5: to that person to try to recreate that somehow, right,
- 39:37Speaker 5: So then you dry them. They have at this point
- 39:41Speaker 5: become kind of like a very dry mac and cheese consistency,
- 39:47Speaker 5: So you spread the beans out on a dehydrator or
- 39:50Speaker 5: out in the sun. We use a dehydrator because we
- 39:52Speaker 5: can control it, and you get them to about three
- 39:55Speaker 5: percent moister content, and I have all the equipment to measure,
- 40:00Speaker 5: but you know, it just basically means pretty dry, and
- 40:03Speaker 5: it takes a while. It takes about two days, and
- 40:05Speaker 5: if you're running the drying machines in your house, it'll
- 40:11Speaker 5: drive you insane because your whole house will smell like brownies,
- 40:15Speaker 5: but at first, sort of acid brownies, because the vinegar
- 40:18Speaker 5: smell is still there, and as you dry them, it
- 40:21Speaker 5: goes down, but there's still notes of vinegar from the
- 40:25Speaker 5: bacterial fermentation process in the beans, and you end up
- 40:28Speaker 5: with these brown cacao beans and they're a little shrunken
- 40:34Speaker 5: and a little sad looking. And then you're ready to roast.
- 40:39Speaker 5: And the roasting is again, it's pretty similar to coffee roasting,
- 40:43Speaker 5: but it's much easier and shorter. And I'm really glad
- 40:46Speaker 5: that I had done coffee roasting in the past because
- 40:48Speaker 5: it prepared me for this. But you roast them with
- 40:54Speaker 5: a decreasing thermal profile from about two hundred and fifty
- 40:59Speaker 5: down to two hundred sea and you want the bean
- 41:03Speaker 5: temperature to get to around two hundred C at the end,
- 41:06Speaker 5: and you'll hear them crack. If you have three percent moisture,
- 41:11Speaker 5: that moisture the inside the bean will boil and and
- 41:16Speaker 5: pop the shell. Actually it's it's kind of like ads, right.
- 41:20Speaker 5: It goes from it changes the curvature of the shell,
- 41:24Speaker 5: and then you get a pop and then you know
- 41:27Speaker 5: that you're done. And people will do two pops or
- 41:29Speaker 5: one pop. And there's a lot of YouTube video on
- 41:33Speaker 5: this because people buy a lot of fermented dried beans
- 41:35Speaker 5: from South America and process the chocolate at them. That's
- 41:39Speaker 5: one of the things that a fancy San Francisco chocolate
- 41:42Speaker 5: chop will do. Okay, so we sort of after I
- 41:45Speaker 5: did the fermentation and the drawing, I re entered the
- 41:48Speaker 5: realm where there's a lot of video help on how
- 41:50Speaker 5: to do this right. But I didn't really look at
- 41:52Speaker 5: it because I was like, I'm better than all of them.
- 41:54Speaker 5: I did all this right, So do the roasting. And
- 41:57Speaker 5: then you have these beans that are sort of like
- 41:59Speaker 5: now puffy, so they're kind of you know, rugby ball shaped,
- 42:05Speaker 5: and then you have to shell them and they are
- 42:08Speaker 5: machines that do this. When you buy commercial nibs, the
- 42:12Speaker 5: nib is actually the bean itself once it's been shelled,
- 42:16Speaker 5: after being roasted and dried, dried and roasted, they're all
- 42:20Speaker 5: little bits and it's because of the machine in order
- 42:23Speaker 5: to remove the shell mechanically has to sort of pulverize everything.
- 42:27Speaker 5: But if you do it by hand sitting in front
- 42:29Speaker 5: of the television, you get the complete beans out. And
- 42:31Speaker 5: they're a pictures of this on my Twitter. And I
- 42:34Speaker 5: have to say, during the roasting process, what happens is
- 42:38Speaker 5: the vinegar smells and all the other strange odors go
- 42:42Speaker 5: away and you're left with just a pure chocolate smell.
- 42:46Speaker 5: And it's very very remarkable. It smells like the most
- 42:49Speaker 5: incredible chocolate cake brownie that you've ever baked in your
- 42:53Speaker 5: oven at the end of the roasting process.
- 42:55Speaker 2: I've actually roasted cacao beans myself on the stovetop and
- 42:58Speaker 2: been amazed. It's like a a river of chocolate smell.
- 43:02Speaker 2: It's like snorting pure chocolate. It's incredible.
- 43:05Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 43:06Speaker 5: And so then from there you go on and do
- 43:08Speaker 5: the normal thing to make chocolate. And it's important to
- 43:11Speaker 5: have a wet grinder it's important to let it go
- 43:14Speaker 5: for you know, three or four days, because the cocow
- 43:18Speaker 5: beans are actually just basically wood and it's extremely fibrous,
- 43:24Speaker 5: but it contains you know, a lot of fat, the
- 43:27Speaker 5: cocow butter inside that fibers structure. And there's a sort
- 43:31Speaker 5: of a magical thing that happens when you grind this
- 43:35Speaker 5: and you get a little bit of heat out of
- 43:37Speaker 5: the mechanical grinding action, which is that you start to
- 43:41Speaker 5: get this magical paste and that's that's getting close to
- 43:45Speaker 5: the thing that we think of as chocolate. And you
- 43:51Speaker 5: have to wet grind this thing and a wet stone
- 43:54Speaker 5: grinder for days and days to get the average particle
- 43:57Speaker 5: size small enough in that fiber structure that on the
- 44:03Speaker 5: tongue it feels like.
- 44:04Speaker 4: You would expect from smooth chocolate.
- 44:07Speaker 5: And so that takes a lot of time, and it
- 44:10Speaker 5: turns out some equipment and knowledge. I did a little study,
- 44:14Speaker 5: you know, because I have microscopes and autoclaves and all
- 44:17Speaker 5: the stuff in my kitchen from the bread projects. So
- 44:19Speaker 5: I was able to do some smears and look at
- 44:21Speaker 5: average particle sizes and correlate that. Because I was given
- 44:25Speaker 5: the hint from some chocolate tears correlate that with the
- 44:29Speaker 5: current drawn by the malange by the wet grinder. There's
- 44:34Speaker 5: a pretty linear relationship between you amount a current that
- 44:37Speaker 5: you're using and the particle size, and that's how they
- 44:40Speaker 5: determine when they get done.
- 44:41Speaker 2: So you can tell the size of your chocolate particles
- 44:44Speaker 2: by how hard your grinder has to work. Basically that's correct, yeah,
- 44:48Speaker 2: at a given temperature. And then there's some chemistry involved
- 44:51Speaker 2: in like actually making it a bar. It's got like
- 44:53Speaker 2: some complex crystal structure that you need to reach with
- 44:56Speaker 2: the right temperature voyage for this whole process. Right.
- 44:58Speaker 5: You know, I'm going to go ahead and call that
- 44:59Speaker 5: physic because it's really crystallography. You know, I work with
- 45:04Speaker 5: a lot of chemists, so we can we you know,
- 45:05Speaker 5: we can fight over this.
- 45:07Speaker 4: But yeah. The trick then after that.
- 45:10Speaker 5: Is to make it into a stable bar, and that
- 45:15Speaker 5: means establishing with the cacao butter with that fat. It's
- 45:20Speaker 5: type two crystal, which is a stable crystalin matrix in
- 45:27Speaker 5: shirt sleeve room temperature conditions for human beings. That's referred
- 45:31Speaker 5: to in the industry as temper, but it's really a
- 45:33Speaker 5: crystaline structure as you know, and alluded to, and so
- 45:35Speaker 5: finding out how to establish that is a bit of
- 45:38Speaker 5: a trick. And part of the problem that we had
- 45:41Speaker 5: is we know too much. So it was me and
- 45:43Speaker 5: biologists and chemists and another physicist, and so we knew
- 45:47Speaker 5: too much about crystallography. So we did all these crazy
- 45:50Speaker 5: schemes that only kind of partially worked. And then finally
- 45:53Speaker 5: we just did the thing that everybody else doesn't work
- 45:56Speaker 5: fine and made bars. And you know, when we made
- 46:02Speaker 5: the first chocolate from our own beans from our trees,
- 46:10Speaker 5: all of us thought it was the best chocolate we'd
- 46:13Speaker 5: ever had, easily, And I am still completely ruined. It's
- 46:19Speaker 5: been six months now, but I am ruined, and my
- 46:23Speaker 5: wife is ruined, and everyone is ruined. We can't we
- 46:26Speaker 5: get other chocolate and it's just not as good. And
- 46:32Speaker 5: recently I was very very very brave, and I gave
- 46:38Speaker 5: a bar of this chocolate to my friend jose Andres,
- 46:42Speaker 5: the chef, and he said it was the best chocolate
- 46:45Speaker 5: he's ever had, and he's now told other people it's
- 46:47Speaker 5: the best chocolate he's ever had. And so, you know,
- 46:51Speaker 5: I think that keeping everything simple and pure, you know,
- 46:57Speaker 5: not adding anything, the only ingredient in ourcolate bar is
- 47:00Speaker 5: sugar in some measure to give you, you know, the amount.
- 47:03Speaker 4: That you like.
- 47:04Speaker 5: How dark do you want your chocolate? In our case,
- 47:06Speaker 5: we went to about seventy percent. How it sounds amazing,
- 47:12Speaker 5: there's nothing else in it, and it's it's really good,
- 47:17Speaker 5: and you know, we're going to keep on doing it
- 47:20Speaker 5: because it's so good. It's it's it's very interesting and really,
- 47:27Speaker 5: even though it's so hard to do and has so
- 47:30Speaker 5: many steps, the magic in the last part of the fermentation.
- 47:38Speaker 4: Is worth it. It's worth it.
- 47:41Speaker 5: I do it over and over again because I never
- 47:43Speaker 5: tire of that moment when it changes to chocolate.
- 47:45Speaker 4: It's incredible.
- 47:47Speaker 5: And you know, I'm around fermentation all the time. We
- 47:49Speaker 5: have the Ancient Bread project, other bread projects, other fermentation projects,
- 47:56Speaker 5: and you know, the even when you're doing beer making,
- 48:00Speaker 5: the fermentation is a you know, nano machinery process and
- 48:07Speaker 5: service of something else, in service of getting CO two
- 48:10Speaker 5: distributed evenly through you know, a piece of dough so
- 48:14Speaker 5: that you can freeze it in the oven and have
- 48:15Speaker 5: bread right freeze the structure by baking. In the case
- 48:19Speaker 5: of the cacao, the fermentation it is the flavor, it's everything.
- 48:25Speaker 5: It's remarkable.
- 48:26Speaker 2: So, now that you've had this incredible dark chocolate and
- 48:28Speaker 2: you understand it all the way from Dirk to bar,
- 48:31Speaker 2: what are your thoughts on industrial chocolate, for example Hershey's.
- 48:35Speaker 5: Oh, it's a valid industrial product. Sometimes you have to
- 48:40Speaker 5: have these things, and you know, I'm not gonna I'm
- 48:44Speaker 5: not going to crap on them. It's it's an incredible story. Actually,
- 48:47Speaker 5: the Hershey's story is an incredible story, both from a
- 48:50Speaker 5: business and a technology standpoint. But I am ruined now,
- 48:57Speaker 5: and I very seriously considering, you know, expanding this operation
- 49:07Speaker 5: and maybe trying to grow a bunch more trees kind
- 49:13Speaker 5: of hydroponically in this way and seeing if you could
- 49:16Speaker 5: make more of this special chocolate in that way, so
- 49:20Speaker 5: we'll see.
- 49:21Speaker 2: Sounds amazing and sounds delicious. Well, thanks very much for
- 49:24Speaker 2: taking us on a tour of your chocolate adventure. Really
- 49:28Speaker 2: happy to be grabbing on your coattails and following along
- 49:31Speaker 2: to learn.
- 49:32Speaker 5: Daniel, it's always a pleasure to talk to you man.
- 49:34Speaker 5: Send me more of your best students, please.
- 49:38Speaker 4: We'll do.
- 49:39Speaker 2: Thanks very much, Take care all.
- 49:41Speaker 1: Right, pretty interesting conversation there, Daniel. What is your big
- 49:46Speaker 1: takeaway from all of this chocolate science.
- 49:49Speaker 2: The takeaway for me is that once a physicist, always
- 49:52Speaker 2: a physicist. You're trained to think like a physicist. You're
- 49:55Speaker 2: going to apply that to everything else you do in
- 49:57Speaker 2: your life, whether it's baking bread and venting new video
- 50:00Speaker 2: game consoles or growing chocolate bars.
- 50:03Speaker 1: Now, do you think knowing all of this physics is
- 50:05Speaker 1: helping him make better chocolate or is he actually leaning
- 50:08Speaker 1: on chemistry?
- 50:11Speaker 2: I think there's a fuzzy line here.
- 50:12Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 50:13Speaker 1: Absolutely, it sounds like pretty straight up chemistry. He's definitely
- 50:18Speaker 1: scientific thinking, no offense, no offense.
- 50:20Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fine, I get it. You know, the chocolate
- 50:23Speaker 2: is more chemistry than physics. I'll admit it.
- 50:24Speaker 1: Absolutely, so his physic preparation is of no help.
- 50:28Speaker 2: I mean he didn't get down to like the fundamental
- 50:30Speaker 2: chocolate particle or anything. So having been a particle physicist,
- 50:33Speaker 2: I don't think is an issue. But definitely his scientific
- 50:35Speaker 2: background helped him, like read the papers and do this
- 50:38Speaker 2: carefully and methodically and you know, gather some data.
- 50:42Speaker 1: Well, I feel like this is maybe like a small
- 50:44Speaker 1: badge type of chocolate production. But things get a little
- 50:47Speaker 1: bit more complicated and maybe more difficult when you try
- 50:50Speaker 1: to scale it up and you try to give chocolate
- 50:52Speaker 1: to a lot of people.
- 50:53Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. You have a lot more freedom to play
- 50:55Speaker 2: when you're making up just a few bars for you
- 50:57Speaker 2: and your friends. But when you're the chief chocolate officer
- 51:00Speaker 2: at one of the world's biggest snacks food companies, then
- 51:04Speaker 2: you have a whole different set of challenges.
- 51:06Speaker 1: Well, you actually got to talk to a former research
- 51:10Speaker 1: scientist at a large corporation. How did you meet this fellow?
- 51:13Speaker 2: So One of our listeners, Darcio, is a chocolate researcher
- 51:17Speaker 2: in Brazil, and heard us joking about chocolate on the
- 51:19Speaker 2: podcast and wrote to me suggesting that we do a
- 51:22Speaker 2: deep dive into chocolate. He was actually the inspiration for
- 51:25Speaker 2: this episode and introduced me to his friend Jim Kaiser,
- 51:30Speaker 2: former chief chocolate officer at Mars Inc.
- 51:33Speaker 1: Well wait, wait, wait, wait, we know an actual chocolate researcher, Like,
- 51:37Speaker 1: what's this research?
- 51:39Speaker 2: It's like chemical engineering, you know, industrial processes for producing
- 51:43Speaker 2: chocolate at scale with consistency and purity and quality.
- 51:48Speaker 1: WHOA yeah, because I guess they farm a lot of
- 51:51Speaker 1: chocolate in Brazil, right.
- 51:52Speaker 2: They do farm a lot of chocolate all over the world,
- 51:55Speaker 2: and in the interview with him, we talk about the
- 51:57Speaker 2: challenges of getting chocolate from all different locations where the
- 52:00Speaker 2: processes are different.
- 52:02Speaker 1: M how there is a different taste that come from
- 52:05Speaker 1: different themes.
- 52:06Speaker 2: Right exactly, which is not what you want if you're
- 52:08Speaker 2: the Mars company. You want your eminem to taste the
- 52:10Speaker 2: same no matter where you are in the world and
- 52:13Speaker 2: which batch of chocolate it was. We'll get into all that,
- 52:16Speaker 2: but first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back
- 52:31Speaker 2: and we're talking about physics and chocolate.
- 52:34Speaker 1: All right, Well, here's Daniel's interview with Professor Kaiser, former
- 52:38Speaker 1: chocolate research scientists at Mars Corporation.
- 52:42Speaker 2: So it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast. John Kaiser,
- 52:46Speaker 2: an expert in mass production of chocolate and a researcher
- 52:50Speaker 2: who has worked on the forefront of chocolate knowledge. John,
- 52:53Speaker 2: Welcome to the podcast.
- 52:54Speaker 3: Thank you, Daniel. That's a happy day if I get
- 52:57Speaker 3: to talk about chocolate. I appreciate you invited me to
- 52:59Speaker 3: this podcast.
- 53:01Speaker 2: Thank you. Well. First, I want to know how does
- 53:03Speaker 2: one become a chocolate researcher. Is that something you grew
- 53:07Speaker 2: up wanting to be and followed your passion or you
- 53:10Speaker 2: stumbled into it.
- 53:11Speaker 3: I knew I wanted to work on food. My father
- 53:13Speaker 3: had worked on food at PNG, their brands pring, goals, folders,
- 53:19Speaker 3: and I love the black box. And that's what chemical
- 53:24Speaker 3: engineers solve. We have raw materials, dried potatoes and everyone
- 53:28Speaker 3: inside the box, and you have a beautifully shaped pring
- 53:32Speaker 3: go out the other end. It tastes, it looks straight.
- 53:34Speaker 3: So I was always fascinated by what's the black box?
- 53:38Speaker 3: So I knew I did enter the food industry, and
- 53:42Speaker 3: I started craft in Chicago, first up in glen View,
- 53:45Speaker 3: working on a variety of food brands, ice cream, mayonnaise,
- 53:50Speaker 3: and Miracle Web. And then that led us to a
- 53:55Speaker 3: role at Mars working on cocoa and chocolate. That's where
- 54:00Speaker 3: I spent almost thirty years. Wow, every aspect of coca
- 54:05Speaker 3: and child production globally.
- 54:07Speaker 2: So what do people not know about making chocolate? I mean,
- 54:11Speaker 2: it's much more than just roast the beans and blend
- 54:14Speaker 2: them up. What it is sort of the secret sauce
- 54:16Speaker 2: to turning cocoa beans into chocolate that people might not understand.
- 54:21Speaker 3: Well, I'd say the fascinating part of chocolate, and I
- 54:26Speaker 3: always include cocoa as part of that is how difficult
- 54:30Speaker 3: it is to produce a consistent, wonderful tasting product. And
- 54:37Speaker 3: that's really what's kept me intrigued in this area for
- 54:41Speaker 3: so many years, and I still work on it here
- 54:42Speaker 3: at iowas Fate. So the linkage I see is nearly
- 54:47Speaker 3: every aspect of the unit operations a chemical engineering study,
- 54:52Speaker 3: from harvest of a cocoa pod in origin, all the
- 54:56Speaker 3: way to a molded product in M and M or
- 55:00Speaker 3: she makee chocolate bar. Nearly every aspect has a linkage
- 55:04Speaker 3: to flavor and texture and solving that, Understanding that and
- 55:10Speaker 3: understanding that in an operational role every day is not easy.
- 55:16Speaker 3: So that's really kept me very interesting because there is
- 55:19Speaker 3: issues all along that product pipeline.
- 55:23Speaker 2: Give us an example of something that's challenging in mass
- 55:25Speaker 2: production of delicious chocolate.
- 55:27Speaker 3: So back to the complexity. So cocoa is not cocoa,
- 55:32Speaker 3: first of all, So the variety of cocoa that you
- 55:35Speaker 3: find in the origin can have an bone on flavor.
- 55:38Speaker 3: So you have to pick what you want, and what
- 55:40Speaker 3: you want is what the consumer ultimately wants, so you
- 55:43Speaker 3: have to really start with the consumer. But how that
- 55:46Speaker 3: product is harvested really more how it's fermented in origin
- 55:52Speaker 3: can again have a major impact on flavor. For example,
- 55:57Speaker 3: and practices are not standardized. Growers farmers across the globe
- 56:03Speaker 3: don't have a script and say oh, this is how
- 56:05Speaker 3: we do it now. They don't have the script. They
- 56:08Speaker 3: do it based on history, they do it based on economics.
- 56:11Speaker 3: It's not well controlled. As soon as pods are opened
- 56:15Speaker 3: in the origin, they're opening with machete. I mean, that
- 56:18Speaker 3: is the typical way of opening a pod. Pods have
- 56:21Speaker 3: a very thick husk. You extract about fifty beans from
- 56:26Speaker 3: a pod, and the beans are surrounded by the sticky, gooey,
- 56:30Speaker 3: high sugar, high acid, relatively speaking, pulp that actually tastes delicious.
- 56:36Speaker 3: By the way, if you're in origin, taste taste the beans.
- 56:40Speaker 3: Don't chew the beans because extremely a stringent it. We'll
- 56:42Speaker 3: get to that point here about fermentation. But as you
- 56:46Speaker 3: suck the pulp off the beans, they have a very
- 56:49Speaker 3: pleasant fruity characteristic that those in Ecuador and Brazil. Darcie
- 56:54Speaker 3: who can speak to this, will extract that and convert
- 56:58Speaker 3: into a beverage.
- 56:59Speaker 2: Like a chocolate fruit beverage.
- 57:01Speaker 3: It really doesn't taste like chocolate at all. It just
- 57:03Speaker 3: has a fruity, pleasant flavor.
- 57:06Speaker 2: I wonder how many people have ever tasted that. I
- 57:07Speaker 2: don't think I know anybody else who's ever tasted the
- 57:10Speaker 2: actual chocolate fruit.
- 57:12Speaker 3: It's definitely rare. You know, you have to pasteurize it
- 57:14Speaker 3: in origin if you want to ship it somewhere. Because
- 57:17Speaker 3: here's the point. It's the microfloor in environment automatically goes
- 57:22Speaker 3: after those sugars as soon as you open it, so
- 57:24Speaker 3: fermentation starts the instant you open the pot. Those beans
- 57:28Speaker 3: are manually scooped out. And this may seem a bit
- 57:33Speaker 3: our kid because it is because it has not really
- 57:36Speaker 3: changed over the course of you know, at least one
- 57:40Speaker 3: hundred years. Where those beans are then piled on banana LEAs,
- 57:45Speaker 3: typically on the ground in origin heat and the fermentation begins.
- 57:50Speaker 2: And to be clear, fermentation means like microbial processing. Right,
- 57:54Speaker 2: basically we're talking about desirable rotting, right.
- 57:57Speaker 3: That's it. That's exactly correct, okay, but has a huge influence.
- 58:02Speaker 3: So if you and some growers do this around the
- 58:04Speaker 3: globe where they'll skip the fermentation, they'll go straight to
- 58:08Speaker 3: dry it. And if you do that, the beans are
- 58:11Speaker 3: very very stringent, very bitter, and there are some recipes
- 58:17Speaker 3: that may be an attribute you want and it's another
- 58:21Speaker 3: i say, processed driver that you can use to influence
- 58:23Speaker 3: your flavor. But typically say the fermentation is between five
- 58:28Speaker 3: and seven days, five.
- 58:29Speaker 2: And seven days sitting there rotting on a banana leaf.
- 58:33Speaker 3: Yes, Now the larger drowers will have i'll call box fermentation.
- 58:38Speaker 3: They'll place these beans in a much larger, larger wooden
- 58:41Speaker 3: box and then they'll actually use a hand agitator really
- 58:47Speaker 3: just hand scoop and move those beans around, because you
- 58:50Speaker 3: imagine the thermal heat of the fermentation will be greatest
- 58:54Speaker 3: in the center, so you want to spread that out
- 58:56Speaker 3: across the whole box. So yeah, for sure, beings that
- 59:01Speaker 3: are not fermented and those that are fully fermented will
- 59:05Speaker 3: taste dramatically different. And those practices are very different, y'all say,
- 59:11Speaker 3: the more the standardized fermentation process that we've witnessed or
- 59:15Speaker 3: those that you see in West Africa Ivory Coast, Godam
- 59:20Speaker 3: where they're typically fully fermented. Now keep in mind, you
- 59:24Speaker 3: can go, you can be over fermented, and that will
- 59:26Speaker 3: also cause a flavor impact. And then anything in between
- 59:29Speaker 3: zero and say five to seven days. So this is
- 59:33Speaker 3: where the complexity just begins Dandiel. So you can have
- 59:36Speaker 3: a whole range of flavor influences and I won't call
- 59:39Speaker 3: it a flavor defect because flavor is subjective. You may
- 59:44Speaker 3: love it, hey, I love an over fermented being in
- 59:47Speaker 3: its flavor or totally underfremented. So it actually ends up
- 59:51Speaker 3: being a consumer driven experience. What do they want?
- 59:55Speaker 2: But if you want to produce the same eminem every day,
- 59:58Speaker 2: every year for thirty years, how do you you handle
- 1:00:00Speaker 2: that when you get a batch of over fermented and
- 1:00:02Speaker 2: a batch of under fermented. Do you have to adjust
- 1:00:05Speaker 2: the process or do you have some way to mask
- 1:00:07Speaker 2: it or how does that work?
- 1:00:08Speaker 3: That's one of the distinctions you're hitting right now is
- 1:00:10Speaker 3: the small versus large. I'm a little biased because I
- 1:00:13Speaker 3: spent my career at Marsin and we're working on all
- 1:00:17Speaker 3: these challenges across thirty years, and it is difficult to
- 1:00:22Speaker 3: make an eminent taste the same around the globe. It
- 1:00:25Speaker 3: is very difficult because you have so many influences, including
- 1:00:30Speaker 3: the practices they're observed. So the way you mitigate that
- 1:00:33Speaker 3: is a lot of coke we purchased off the market,
- 1:00:38Speaker 3: but per our spec, per our flavor and chemical spec.
- 1:00:41Speaker 3: So you want to make sure that it is fermented
- 1:00:44Speaker 3: properly and you're buying best specification. So that's how Marge
- 1:00:48Speaker 3: will do it all the way to mitigate am I
- 1:00:51Speaker 3: giving anything? Wait here, this is pretty typical for a
- 1:00:53Speaker 3: Hurshy and Mars and I'm on delays.
- 1:00:57Speaker 4: Is there's a.
- 1:00:58Speaker 3: Cocoa recipe, You would not bank the farm on a
- 1:01:02Speaker 3: single origin. You want a percentage of different origins and
- 1:01:07Speaker 3: that gives you the flavor profile that is consistent, and
- 1:01:11Speaker 3: it also helps mitigate that risk because civil wars do
- 1:01:15Speaker 3: occur in ivory coasts.
- 1:01:17Speaker 2: Yeah, you have.
- 1:01:18Speaker 3: Weather impact, sustainability concerns. Lots of these things will occur
- 1:01:23Speaker 3: over the course of a year, and you have to
- 1:01:26Speaker 3: be prepared to move around and ensure that the product
- 1:01:30Speaker 3: still meets the products back.
- 1:01:32Speaker 2: So what's the major difference between like very fancy, artisanal
- 1:01:37Speaker 2: small batch bar chocolate you might pay like eight dollars
- 1:01:40Speaker 2: for and something like a Hershey bar. Is it the
- 1:01:44Speaker 2: quality of the chocolate? Is it preservatives? Is something different
- 1:01:47Speaker 2: in the process? What is basically the difference between the
- 1:01:50Speaker 2: spectrum of quality for chocolate?
- 1:01:53Speaker 3: The large manufacturer has a lot more at risk. So
- 1:01:58Speaker 3: if you have a recall a product because of some
- 1:02:02Speaker 3: microbial contamination or adulteration due to incidental form matter that's
- 1:02:07Speaker 3: in the product you're recalling. It could could really sacrifice
- 1:02:11Speaker 3: your brand. So the large manufacturers tend to be very conservative,
- 1:02:15Speaker 3: but they're very consistent, I'd say very consistent. The smaller
- 1:02:20Speaker 3: players have more leeway, they have less at risk, and
- 1:02:24Speaker 3: they're faster, they're more flexible, you know. I think the
- 1:02:28Speaker 3: thing that I think is interesting is the large manufacturers
- 1:02:31Speaker 3: have a business. Eminem's the biggest global brand for chocolate.
- 1:02:35Speaker 3: They want to be as flexible as small guys, but
- 1:02:37Speaker 3: they can't. The small guys want to have more market share,
- 1:02:43Speaker 3: but that's a challenge for them also, so the small manufacturers,
- 1:02:48Speaker 3: as you said costs before this call, it just took
- 1:02:51Speaker 3: a look at a cost program. Two cents per gram
- 1:02:55Speaker 3: for a Dove or Hershey no chocolate roughly sense a
- 1:03:00Speaker 3: gram for she had Dandili, which is a very specialty
- 1:03:05Speaker 3: niche product. Really, you know, that's the difference in order,
- 1:03:08Speaker 3: mattitude in difference. So what are consumers willing to pay
- 1:03:11Speaker 3: for what they get?
- 1:03:13Speaker 2: Let's talk about the Hershey bar also because it's iconic.
- 1:03:16Speaker 2: On the podcast, recently, I commented that I was not
- 1:03:19Speaker 2: a particular fan of the Hershey bar because it has
- 1:03:21Speaker 2: this sour flavor to it. Where does that sourness come from?
- 1:03:26Speaker 2: Is it some property of milk chocolate? Is it some
- 1:03:29Speaker 2: secret process that Hershey has? Why are Hershey bar so sour?
- 1:03:33Speaker 3: Yes? I love the history of chocolate, so let's talk hershy.
- 1:03:36Speaker 3: Hershey started making caramel in Lancaster, PA. That's where my
- 1:03:41Speaker 3: family and I spent thirty years just north of there
- 1:03:43Speaker 3: in Mannheim. Started that business, Uh, grew it pretty well
- 1:03:47Speaker 3: downtown Lancaster, went to the expo in Chicago, to this
- 1:03:51Speaker 3: famous expo where this iconic Columbian Expo in Chicago, where
- 1:03:59Speaker 3: he came across Layman, which is a German may Fast
- 1:04:03Speaker 3: of chocolate, really liquored melliing equipment came across that thought
- 1:04:08Speaker 3: at that time that the future is chocolate, not carmel.
- 1:04:13Speaker 3: So moved to child production, bought that equipment in Chicago,
- 1:04:18Speaker 3: brought it back and started Hershey pid making chocolate small scale.
- 1:04:22Speaker 3: Didn't know how to do it yet, didn't know how.
- 1:04:25Speaker 3: He hired a German scientist by named of Klein Klein
- 1:04:31Speaker 3: and with him began to learn about child production. And
- 1:04:38Speaker 3: if you ever talked to a European I go into
- 1:04:42Speaker 3: this fair Hersey. I just want to give you kind
- 1:04:44Speaker 3: of what my skew is. I might spin on it is,
- 1:04:46Speaker 3: and you've already mentioned this. The Europeans are not accustomed
- 1:04:49Speaker 3: to sour milk in their chocolate. They're just not accustomed
- 1:04:52Speaker 3: to it. And that's the history of chocolate and whether
- 1:04:56Speaker 3: a child taste very different from those in the US.
- 1:05:00Speaker 3: So the story is, and I'm sure a Hershey representative
- 1:05:04Speaker 3: may dispute my spin on this, is we talked to
- 1:05:09Speaker 3: Europeans and say, you know, they got the process of
- 1:05:11Speaker 3: drying liquid milk wrong in that it became the lipid
- 1:05:17Speaker 3: catalysis that creates organic acids that gives you the sour
- 1:05:23Speaker 3: character that you get from baby puke.
- 1:05:26Speaker 2: I'm sorry, did you just say baby puke?
- 1:05:28Speaker 3: I did?
- 1:05:29Speaker 4: I did.
- 1:05:29Speaker 3: And I've heard those terms from other Hershey people, so
- 1:05:33Speaker 3: I'm not taking these terms out of context.
- 1:05:35Speaker 2: So we have it on the record from an expert
- 1:05:37Speaker 2: in chocolate that Hershey's tastes like baby puke.
- 1:05:41Speaker 3: Yeah. Introbution on this one. And as I said, flavor
- 1:05:44Speaker 3: is subjective. My father loves Hershey chocolate that's what he
- 1:05:49Speaker 3: was offered. That's what he ate. He still loves it,
- 1:05:52Speaker 3: and it has a unique i'll call it a unique
- 1:05:55Speaker 3: acid character. It's organic acid, but tyic acid flavor in
- 1:06:00Speaker 3: that chocolate. It gives it that unique flavor. So the
- 1:06:04Speaker 3: story is, and it could be a myth that in
- 1:06:07Speaker 3: the process because it was not known how to dry
- 1:06:10Speaker 3: liquid milk and do it in an efficient way that
- 1:06:14Speaker 3: did not harm the quality, not in the US. Nestley
- 1:06:18Speaker 3: was figuring that out in Europe. Okay, so they were
- 1:06:22Speaker 3: figuring it out Hers. She was trying to do it
- 1:06:25Speaker 3: his way and came up with a way to do it.
- 1:06:28Speaker 3: Developed this acidic flavor which became the profile, which is
- 1:06:34Speaker 3: now their signature flavor, and it is well welllife. It's
- 1:06:38Speaker 3: the biggest brand in the US, so they've got something
- 1:06:42Speaker 3: going on there. So, you know, no disparaging Hershey, they've
- 1:06:45Speaker 3: got a well, well liked product that consumers here really love.
- 1:06:51Speaker 2: I mean, if you can make a billion dollar business
- 1:06:53Speaker 2: out of a baby puke candy, then hats off to you, right,
- 1:06:57Speaker 2: Like wow, very impressive. I could never pcomplished that. I
- 1:07:00Speaker 2: don't think I'd invest in that startup, but I'd be wrong. Apparently.
- 1:07:05Speaker 2: So then you know, if we are still innovating on
- 1:07:07Speaker 2: chocolate and still using chemical engineering and creative ideas to
- 1:07:11Speaker 2: develop new chocolates, what's happening right now, what's like at
- 1:07:14Speaker 2: the forefront of chocolate research, the most brilliant minds in chocolate.
- 1:07:19Speaker 2: What problems are they trying to crack right now?
- 1:07:21Speaker 3: So if you look at the headlines today, sustainability, carbon dioxide,
- 1:07:27Speaker 3: so things are around. Replacing dairy powders with plant based
- 1:07:33Speaker 3: proteins are hot. They were hot five years ago. I
- 1:07:36Speaker 3: know there's interest in it and they are still very
- 1:07:39Speaker 3: important to consider to reduce greenhouse gases to manage I
- 1:07:44Speaker 3: know Mars for sure has a sustainability plan, and all
- 1:07:47Speaker 3: the large manufacturers certainly have a public disclosed approach that
- 1:07:51Speaker 3: they're taking for that. So anything around the way that
- 1:07:58Speaker 3: is processed is being examined to reduce energy consumption. That's
- 1:08:03Speaker 3: I say a blanket statement because each of these components
- 1:08:07Speaker 3: where it's roasting, conching which is an intensive mixing step,
- 1:08:11Speaker 3: or size reduction, are very energy intensive. There's a lot
- 1:08:14Speaker 3: of energy that's required to get to the state that's
- 1:08:18Speaker 3: appealing to consumers. So any place now it's more innovation
- 1:08:22Speaker 3: on the process side. Okay, it's innovation with the process side,
- 1:08:26Speaker 3: but it's really important, important for the manufacturer, and also
- 1:08:31Speaker 3: the consumer is also looking at businesses to see what
- 1:08:35Speaker 3: they're doing that's good for the planet. So for sure,
- 1:08:37Speaker 3: that's where a lot of the innovation is occurring. And then,
- 1:08:40Speaker 3: as I mentioned, on the ingredient side, is more plant
- 1:08:43Speaker 3: based raw materials that can be used and still deliver
- 1:08:47Speaker 3: that superior taste.
- 1:08:49Speaker 2: Fascinating. Now, you mentioned you started your career being intrigued
- 1:08:52Speaker 2: in things like pringles. You've taken the potatoes one side
- 1:08:55Speaker 2: and outcome these perfect crisps. And I've noticed this bizarre
- 1:08:59Speaker 2: innovation in desserts recently, this chocolate covered pringles. And since
- 1:09:04Speaker 2: you began your career in pringles and you ended up
- 1:09:07Speaker 2: in chocolate, I wondered, is this something you came up with?
- 1:09:09Speaker 2: Is this your unholy unification of the snack universe?
- 1:09:13Speaker 3: I can't take credit for that, I could, but do
- 1:09:17Speaker 3: you enjoy them?
- 1:09:18Speaker 2: Do you think?
- 1:09:19Speaker 3: For sure? Yeah? I think that said the savory sweet combination,
- 1:09:24Speaker 3: I think it is very good, really appealing, and coming
- 1:09:28Speaker 3: from the chocolate capital of the US, which is southeastern Pennsylvania,
- 1:09:33Speaker 3: that's Hershey, Bars's large operation there. You have Blomber, which
- 1:09:38Speaker 3: is a large industrial producer there, get divers based out
- 1:09:42Speaker 3: of it. You have a lot of candy, a lot
- 1:09:43Speaker 3: of candy, your peppermint patties, your Pennsylvania so you have
- 1:09:47Speaker 3: a lot of candy production that curve there. It's also
- 1:09:51Speaker 3: the savory snack capital. Oh I see, so hey they're
- 1:09:55Speaker 3: both there. Why not?
- 1:09:57Speaker 2: So nobody knows snacking like Pennsylvania.
- 1:10:01Speaker 3: Pressols a lot of pressol production the Dutch. You know,
- 1:10:05Speaker 3: if you ever go to live as Pennsylvania, it's deemed
- 1:10:07Speaker 3: the place for prezols in the US for first created.
- 1:10:10Speaker 3: And that's not far from Lancaster. So yeah, pretzels and
- 1:10:14Speaker 3: savory snacks are really big in that part of the country.
- 1:10:17Speaker 2: Well, I guess we have Pennsylvania to thank us for
- 1:10:19Speaker 2: pushing us forward on the forefront of human snacking. That's amazing,
- 1:10:24Speaker 2: And thanks very much John Kayser for telling us all
- 1:10:26Speaker 2: about chocolate production and the challenges in producing huge quantities
- 1:10:30Speaker 2: of consistent chocolate that everybody enjoys around the world. Really
- 1:10:34Speaker 2: appreciate your time.
- 1:10:35Speaker 3: Well, thanks for the invitation. This has been a blast
- 1:10:37Speaker 3: for me. Appreciate it.
- 1:10:39Speaker 1: All right, interesting. What did you think about how they
- 1:10:43Speaker 1: approach chocolate making in large scales.
- 1:10:46Speaker 2: I think it's fascinating how the small batch people are
- 1:10:49Speaker 2: really trying to make a unique flavor and the large
- 1:10:53Speaker 2: batch people are really not. They're really struggling with the
- 1:10:56Speaker 2: same question, but they're on different sides of the issue.
- 1:10:59Speaker 2: Jim talks about how the difference in the fermentation process
- 1:11:01Speaker 2: leads to different kinds of flavor, and that sounds awesome
- 1:11:04Speaker 2: if you're artisanal, but that's a nightmare if you're industrial.
- 1:11:08Speaker 1: Well, I feel like it's not like they're not trying
- 1:11:10Speaker 1: to come up with anique, unique flavor. It's like they're
- 1:11:13Speaker 1: trying to keep the flavor consistent.
- 1:11:15Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
- 1:11:17Speaker 1: They might be aiming for, like the flavor of the
- 1:11:19Speaker 1: most amount of people like and to make that consistent.
- 1:11:22Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is exactly what they're going for.
- 1:11:25Speaker 2: And also I didn't realize what a deep rivalry there
- 1:11:27Speaker 2: is between Hershey and Mars. There's a long history there
- 1:11:31Speaker 2: involving like espionage and theft and like really deep anger
- 1:11:35Speaker 2: between these two companies. And you all know that Hershey's
- 1:11:37Speaker 2: isn't my favorite, but no disrespect to those who love it.
- 1:11:41Speaker 2: Because it's not about costs. There's lots of cheap chocolate
- 1:11:43Speaker 2: out there I love, and expensive ones I don't. It's
- 1:11:46Speaker 2: just personal preference. So probably if I want an unbiased
- 1:11:49Speaker 2: opinion about the flavor of Hershey's chocolate, I shouldn't have
- 1:11:52Speaker 2: been talking to somebody from Mars.
- 1:11:55Speaker 1: Well, I didn't even know there are two separate companies,
- 1:11:58Speaker 1: Like there's just those two, Like those are the big chocolate.
- 1:12:02Speaker 2: Those two Pennsylvania snack companies really do dominate the chocolate market.
- 1:12:07Speaker 1: And they're both based in Pennsylvania, m.
- 1:12:09Speaker 2: Exactly the snack capital of the world. According to Jim Geyser.
- 1:12:12Speaker 1: Wow, why Pennsylvania.
- 1:12:14Speaker 2: Somebody from Pennsylvania has to answer that for us?
- 1:12:17Speaker 1: Well, we might have to buy him at Bar Chocolate.
- 1:12:19Speaker 1: We live to tell us.
- 1:12:21Speaker 2: Once that grant comes in, we'll be ready to do that.
- 1:12:23Speaker 1: All right. Well, another interesting dive into daniels as snack habits.
- 1:12:28Speaker 1: Hasn't your doctor at this age told you, like, hey,
- 1:12:31Speaker 1: maybe you should dial down on the saturated fats.
- 1:12:34Speaker 2: There, No chocolate is healthy. Man has all sorts of
- 1:12:36Speaker 2: good stuff in it in moderation.
- 1:12:41Speaker 1: Again, we're doctors, but we're not that kind of doctor.
- 1:12:43Speaker 2: Fermented foods. Man, My wife tells me fermented foods are
- 1:12:46Speaker 2: good for your gut.
- 1:12:47Speaker 1: These statements of not being approved by the Federal Drug Administration.
- 1:12:51Speaker 2: Do not take health advice from me. Please, do not
- 1:12:54Speaker 2: take healthy peace. Don't even take writing advice from me
- 1:12:58Speaker 2: or anything that's right.
- 1:12:59Speaker 1: Don't they advice.
- 1:13:01Speaker 2: Career advice, life advice, any of that stuff. Just listen
- 1:13:04Speaker 2: for the jokes and the knowledge.
- 1:13:06Speaker 1: Yeah, how about physics.
- 1:13:08Speaker 2: Advice and doing my best to give us an honest
- 1:13:10Speaker 2: understanding of the physics of the universe for sure.
- 1:13:12Speaker 1: All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
- 1:13:14Speaker 1: joining us. See you next time.
- 1:13:21Speaker 2: For more science and curiosity, come find us on social
- 1:13:24Speaker 2: media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, disc, Org, Insta,
- 1:13:29Speaker 2: and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
- 1:13:33Speaker 2: and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
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