Lecithin is one of the key ingredients to making chocolate. It acts as a binder or bridge. It holds all the fat and water molecules together, to ensure a smooth tasting chocolate. Until now, the only real way to make sure that lecithin was doing its job was to actually taste the product. (Tasting chocolate over and over, how dreadful!) Food scientists knew it worked, but they did not know why it worked.
That is until now. A team of physicists in Germany have shown that it all comes down to molecular shape and how many hydrogen atoms there are at work. Well, that’s the short version at least. Please click the link below to read the full paper.