Researchers from Zurich have developed a more sustainable and at the same time healthier chocolate. In addition to the cocoa beans, they used additional valuable ingredients from the cocoa fruit, which have hardly been used so far and are now partly used as a sweetener.
“Our process only uses cocoa pod components in the chocolate,” reports the team led by Kim Mishra from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) in the journal “Nature Food”, describing the chocolate as cocoa fruit chocolate.
“It has a similar sweet taste to conventional chocolate while offering better nutritional value with more fiber and lower saturated fat content.” Furthermore, large-scale production could reduce land use and global warming compared to average European dark chocolate chocolate production.”
Cocoa bean is only a small part of the fruit
Because the cocoa bean (photo below) only makes up a very small part of the fruit, the required land area and therefore the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the conversion of the original tropical vegetation per bean are generally high.
“Therefore, increased use of other parts of the cocoa pod, such as the pulp and cocoa shell, could not only contribute to farmers’ income diversification, but also reduce major environmental impacts during the cultivation phase,” the researchers write.
The elongated cocoa fruit – also called cocoa pod – has a hard outer layer. If you cut open the fruit you will see the skin and inside the rows of cocoa beans, each surrounded by light-colored pulp.
Cocoa jelly replaces the granulated sugar
In the new process, the cocoa beans from Ghana were roasted, peeled, ground and sterilized as usual, creating the cocoa mass. The ETH team now used the inner part of the cocoa fruit shell and processed it into a powder.
This mixed it with some of the pulp to make a sweet jelly. This replaced the normally added granulated sugar in the new chocolate. Despite the extra processing, according to the authors, this chocolate recipe is on average more environmentally friendly than the traditional one.
Less fatty acids, more fiber
According to ETH information, thanks to the cocoa jelly used as a sweetener, the cocoa fruit chocolate has a slightly higher fiber content than an average European dark chocolate – 15 grams compared to twelve grams per 100 grams. Furthermore, it contains only 23 grams of saturated fatty acids compared to 33 grams for an average European dark chocolate.
According to the scientists, small farmers could use the new chocolate to market other components of the fruit and thus earn additional income. All that remains is the outer fruit peel, which is traditionally used mainly as fuel or composted, according to ETH.
It will be a while before you can buy the chocolate. After all, ETH has registered a patent on the recipe for cocoa fruit chocolate.
Source: Krone
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