Iridescent Tempered Chocolate | Hacker News Reader

Iridescent Tempered Chocolate

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331 pointsweinzierl34 comments

Take a look at another person's approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoTi0tM4yQ8

That YouTube channel is really great. Their older videos have a lot of lasers but they have expanded into many other subjects. I found them when searching about magnetohydrodynamics on YT. Highly recommended. I generally prefer consuming text but never have an issue sitting through their 30 minute long videos.

Recently they had a video about making very high performance thermal paste and were selling it, but three weeks later it still hasn't shipped and my email a week ago is unanswered. A shame, because their videos are still really great - I wanted to support them financially because the stuff they do is not cheap. But I guess selling a higher quality product for cheaper than the competitors isn't really a great monetization strategy. Meanwhile I had to settle for worse product at a higher price for my high power led project :(

Somehow I knew it was going to be Tech Ingredients based on the confluence of topics. At least now i know he's human haha.

(highly recommend the channel, shows you how to make everything from brilliantly colored smoke bombs to banana brandy to plasma tubes and peltier refrigerators in a fairly precise and clinical manner)

Wow, thanks for turning me on to this guys channel. I like how he goes through the science in a way that’s accessible but doesn’t skimp or handwave.

Very nice video and approach to the problem

(the chocolate part start about 20min in but the candy part is definitely worth a watch as well)

This guy is the Walter White of chocolate.

Very pretty but the intro looks like syrup and not chocolate which is what this post is about. I know that your link promises chocolate later but that's no good here 8)

He switches over to discussing chocolate at the 20 minute mark.

If you skip to the end you'll see chocolate as well.

There are several pieces of irridescent chocolate (white and milk, it looks like) shown in the first shot, 15 seconds in.

You can 3D print stuff on diffraction gratings to produce the same effect: https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printing-on-diffraction-gratin...

There's a patent for casting holograms on chocolate by the same process. (Holograms rely on the same constructive interference effect as diffraction gratings). You need enough sugar in the mix to produce a hard shiny surface to the chocolate.

You can also cut a record on chocolate, but you don't get more than a couple of plays before the needle wears away the grooves.

The patent (expired in 2005): https://patents.google.com/patent/US4668523A/en

A New York Times interview about it: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/02/garden/where-no-candy-has...

Thanks for looking those up. I wonder why it never took off - adding surface interest without adding colourings seems like a no-brainer to me.

Hey, snap! Your comment appeared while I was typing mine! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23131386)

It was Scientific American. When I was an unemployed pre-internet late-teen, I went through my local library's entire collection, right back to the first Mathematical Games column, and photocopied everything I found interesting. That was one of the articles I snagged.

I did successfully make some iridescent chocolate after that, with a diffraction grating I bought from Edmunds Scientific as a mould.

By the by, you may be interested in this: https://www.litiholo.com/ I'm probably going to buy one at some point.

Title should include the tweet's author, that would have made me click a Twitter link without hesitation. I loved Samy Kamkar's work already but didn't know he also did hacked food!

...and three months ago, he uploaded a short clip of his homebrew magnetron sputtering setup!

Samy is my hero. (same guy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)

Is the charge here really proportional to the crime? As frustrating as it might be to MySpace, it's fairly benign, and it highlighted a vulnerability that could have been far, far worse. Surely those three years without Internet would have been better spent highlighting more vulnerabilities, with the threat of jail time if harm is done again.

Yes it was quite a reaction. Regardless, it all worked out, long since behind him.

Well, he was let off with a warning the first time.

Years ago, I read an article (perhaps in Scientific American?) about some scientists who had created holograms on the surface of chocolate. Their plans to commercialize it never materialized, and I haven't been able to find the article again.

I still remember one of the suggested uses of the hologram: to show an image of the filling.

That's weirdly amazing!

One of the possible issues is that the chocolate contracts when cooling down, possibly changing or damaging the diffraction imprint.

Chocolate making is a whole art (and technique) onto itself. Producing fine chocolate requires advanced machines (at least for 19th/20th century standards).

I'm not sure what you consider to be "advanced", but you can get surprisingly really far with just machines that can fit on your kitchen countertop and still produce some pretty high quality flavorful chocolate. In fact, the main equipment that you need to purchase is a tabletop melanger, which is required to refine the chocolate. (Nowadays, you can purchase melangers specced for refining chocolate for 24-72 hours, but perhaps 5-10 years ago, many people were abusing melangers (wet grinders) designed to make dosa batter in 30 minutes.)

For the whole process, pretty much all you need is:

1. an oven to roast cocoa beans (though you probably want a tabletop coffee roaster for reliable results)

2. a rolling pin to break apart roasted beans into nibs and husk (this does get old pretty fast after 5 batches of chocolate, so people recommend moving onto another kitchen countertop device, the Champion Juicer)

3. a hair dryer to separate husk from nibs

4. a melanger, as mentioned above, to refine the nibs (with any desired additives like sugar and milk powder) for 24-72 hours

5. a couple of bowls and a good thermometer for tempering

6. (optional) plastic molds for shaping your chocolate.

https://chocolatealchemy.com/how-to-make-chocolate-the-compl...

(Off-topic: is there a way to format a bulleted/numbered list to not require separate paragraphs?)

Thanks for this description of the process.

I was mostly referring to the presses that separate the cocoa butter from the rest. It's not an easy process (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzcN3cbikzA ). Though as I pointed out, it's probably 19th/20th century technology.

Ah yes, those have also made their way onto kitchen countertops (e.g. the NutriChef Oil Press), but I'd agree that they'd be in the "advanced machinery" category.

Most small batch chocolate makers don't bother with pressing their own cocoa butter because of the scale required to make it worth it. There's only so much cocoa butter you can press from beans, and then you need to figure out what to do with the remaining cocoa solids. (As an exception, Goodnow Farms is one that did invest in one for, I think, $50000; they sell the cocoa solids to restaurant chefs.) As a result, most of this is still in the industrial realm, even if the tech itself isn't particularly new (it hasn't changed much beyond what's in the linked video).

How is that bypassed dead man's switch not an OSHA violation? https://youtu.be/HzcN3cbikzA?t=179

A Swiss startup worked in this direction to offer brand protection and consumer engagement http://www.morphotonix.com/chocolate/

Can someone explain the science behind this process? It looks really cool but I don't understand how this is achieved. He puts the chocolate into a vacuum chamber and molds it with something? Or is it the vacuum itself that adds the effect without the chocolate being merged with anything?

Diffraction gratings are composed of a series of ridges spaced very closely and regularly, and this physical shape is transferred to the chocolate through the molding process. Light bouncing off of the different ridges creates an interference pattern which varies for different wavelengths of light, creating a rainbow effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating

Google for a "reflective diffraction grating". If you shape the surface a certain way - grooves with a size near the visible wavelength, AFAI understand - you can get the reflected light to interfere with itself. The imperfections which vary the groove size then result in this rainbow effect.

It’s moulded. The vacuum helps to make the end result hold the shape better.

Clever and fun. And I can just imagine how this can assist the teaching of quantum mechanics:

"Professor, I didn't really understand what just happened with the double slit experiment there. (munch) I'm gonna need some more chocolate."

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