The same ingredients with a wildly different outcome.
I’m at the ready to answer life’s big questions. Should you dump him? Yes. What happens when we die? Worms. What is time? Quick. Will I ever be happy? Yes. Do Easter eggs taste better than a block of chocolate? Yes. No. I don’t know. How is one meant to rank two of life’s greatest pleasures?
It’s not for lack of trying. There was an Easter egg on my desk an hour ago, and now there’s only a foil wrapper. There was a Favourites-sized Dairy Milk bar in the treat jar and now there’s not. They seemed different and yet two food scientists found that the ingredients of a Cadbury egg are basically the same as a block. I hate to go against science but it doesn’t taste that way. Is it all in my head? I had to ask the less scientific experts.
The Bennetts factory in Mangawhai is having its busiest week of the year. In the factory behind the glass wall of the flagship store, head chocolatier Lynn van Dommelen and her team are trying to make as many bunnies, eggs, hot cross marshmallow buns and chocolate Easter squares with little chicks on them as possible when an annoying journalist calls. The question I ask was being discussed in the staff room just yesterday. The consensus is that yes, hollow Easter treats do taste better than solid blocks of chocolate. The team at Bennetts was already onto the next question – why?
At Bennetts, the exact same Belgian chocolate is used for both the Easter eggs and their regular chocolate bars, so it’s not because of a change in ingredients. The main difference, says van Dommelen, is that hollow chocolate is hollow. This means it comes to people’s mouths as a broken-off chunk, which is thin. “The thinner your chocolate is, the better it will melt on your tongue,” she says. “You can definitely taste the flavour, the actual chocolate flavour, better.”
This thinness is elsewhere described as “a large contact area inside the mouth”. Human mouths are typically 37°C, significantly higher than the average temperatures at Easter time in New Zealand, which range from 9.7°C to 16.1°C around the country. The melting temperature of regular chocolate is 30-32°C, so our mouths are comparatively a furnace.
If you have ever baked cookies, you will know that heating up chocolate leads to delightful aromas. If this is happening inside our hot little furnace mouths, the smells go straight up the back of our noses and contribute to us experiencing yum. Scientists haven’t settled on a number, but agree that smell plays a “dominant” role in tasting food.
The quick melt also affects our perception of chocolate’s texture, a quality our mouths are especially sensitive to. It’s desirable that chocolate be smooth, creamy and mouth-coating, and being quick to melt helps achieve this. Our eyes add to the perception of the yummy creaminess of Easter eggs, as for some reason we expect chocolate in rounded shapes to be creamier.
For the busy chocolatier van Dommelen, the extra joy that Easter chocolates bring is also immaterial. “It’s connected to memories, obviously,” she says. “Easter is a very, very nice celebration. I think as grown-ups, we go back to our memories, our childhood memories, where we ate those eggs.” The best thing about Easter – when she’s working overtime to stock the shop and annoying journalists are calling – is seeing the looks on kids’ faces when they see the giant chocolate bunny in the window. “They’re like, ‘Wow!’”
So now we have a new existential question. If it makes children happy, and it tastes better, why isn’t all chocolate hollow, or at least thin? The answer is very familiar, and evil. It is harder, and therefore more expensive, to make hollow chocolates. My thoughts go out to the Whittaker’s Easter kiwi, a recent casualty. But don’t despair just yet. Next week, when all the eggs and bunnies have been gobbled up, you can instead focus on your chocolate eating technique. Become a sucker. If you put chocolate in your mouth and suck it instead of chewing, you give it the time and heat to melt and release those delicious aromas. Think of your mouth as a slow cooker, more time = more flavour. This is actual science.
The definitive ruling:
Yes, hollow chocolate tastes better than solid chocolate.
