Until now, most of the fruit used in the process of making chocolate has been thrown away. It was a bit like picking up a nice ripe apple, but instead of biting into it, you keep the seeds and throw the rest away. That’s what chocolate producers have traditionally done with the cocoa fruit — used the beans and discarded the rest. Now, food scientists in Switzerland have come up with a way to make chocolate using the entire cocoa fruit rather than just the beans……and without using sugar. The chocolate, developed at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology by scientist Kim Mishra and his team, includes the cocoa fruit pulp, the juice, and the husk. The key to the new chocolate lies in its very sweet juice, which tastes a bit like pineapple. The juice, which is 14% sugar, is distilled down to form a highly concentrated syrup, combined with the pulp, and then mixed with the dried husk to form a very sweet cocoa gel. The gel, when added to the cocoa beans to make chocolate, eliminates the need for sugar. In Switzerland, some of the bigger producers, including Lindt, are beginning to use the cocoa fruit as well as the beans, but so far no chocolatier has taken the step of eliminating sugar altogether. Mishra and his team are hopeful that the innovation will soon attract the attention of chocolate manufacturers.
