Question Corner: What makes chocolate smell musty and mouldy?
The Hindu
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(Subscribe to Science For All, our weekly newsletter, where we aim to take the jargon out of science and put the fun in. .) Cocoa beans, when fermented correctly, have a pleasant smell with sweet and floral notes. But they can have an off-putting scent when fermentation goes wrong, or when storage conditions aren’t quite right and microorganisms grow on them. If these beans make their way into the manufacturing process, the final chocolate can smell unpleasant. Researchers had previously used molecular techniques to identify the compounds that contribute to undesirable smoky flavours. By using gas chromatography in combination with olfactometry and mass spectrometry, researchers at the Technical University of Munich, Germany identified 57 molecules that made up the scent profiles of both normal and musty/mouldy smelling cocoa beans. Of these compounds, four had higher concentrations in off-smelling samples.More Related News