On 'fermented' milk chocolate and elite hypocrisy

0:00 Imagine I told you I had discovered a new kind of chocolate.

0:05 Fermented milk chocolate.

0:09 All the cool kids love fermentation,

0:12 which in a culinary context is the process by which we

0:15 allow microorganisms to eat our food a little before we do,

0:19 thus creating new chemical byproducts like acids

0:22 and alcohols that can preserve our food

0:25 for us and also make it taste really complex and interesting and good.

0:30 The scientific definition is a little more specific than that.

0:33 Fermentation definitionally happens without oxygen anorobically,

0:38 which is one thing that makes like carefully controlled fermentation in a jar

0:43 or something very different from just letting your food rot out in the open air.

0:47 But anyways, fermentation is hip again now

0:51 that it's no longer necessary for food preservation.

0:54 We have refrigerators now and only unnecessary things can be cool.

1:01 The cool kids have ascribed all kinds of health benefits to fermented foods,

1:05 a number of which might actually be real.

1:09 I suppose chocolate is hip in its own way,

1:12 in part because of real or imagined health benefits.

1:16 But when is chocolate ever not in style?

1:18 I mean, am I right?

1:21 I guess milk chocolate is not particularly cool.

1:24 Milk chocolate is the chocolate that you eat when you're a little kid because

1:28 it's smoother and milder than the hard

1:30 stuff that you get into when you're older.

1:33 The super dark chocolate.

1:34 There's no room for milk in a bar that's hyped up as being 80% cocoa solids.

1:41 So, yeah, milk chocolate is a childish thing.

1:44 People know they're supposed to put away,

1:48 but a lot of us retain an affection for it.

1:50 And one of the biggest food trends in recent years

1:53 has been to put an elevated spin on a childhood favorite,

1:57 thus making it cool again for adults to eat.

2:00 Think of the retro kids breakfast cereals remarketed for adults

2:04 or the the craft fast food style burgers, that kind of thing.

2:09 So once more I ask you,

2:10 what would you think if I said that I've discovered this new

2:13 milk chocolate where the milk is fermented like kimchi or smmancy cheese?

2:21 Well, I reckon you might be secretly repulsed by the idea,

2:24 but if I put it in a brown paper sleeve

2:26 to coat it as being handcrafted or small batch or whatever,

2:32 you'd probably agree to taste it just to show how sophisticated you are.

2:36 And maybe you'd be repulsed by the combination

2:39 of cheesy fermented flavors with a chocolate dessert,

2:43 even though that is hardly unprecedented, right?

2:46 Chocolate cheesecake is a thing.

2:49 Chocolate cake with cream cheese icing, that's a thing.

2:52 Chocolate chip canoli with a sweetened ricotta mixture on the inside.

2:56 Chocolate and cheese is very much a thing.

3:00 Perhaps you would remind yourself of that upon accepting

3:03 my offer of some hipster fermented milk chocolate nonsense.

3:06 And then you'd have a bite and then you'd think

3:12 that doesn't taste like chocolate and marcapone or chocolate and ricotta.

3:18 That tastes like chocolate and parmesan.

3:21 [snorts] There's an intense flavor in there that you

3:24 associate with savory fermented foods, not sweet ones.

3:28 And that clash of sweet and savory disturbs you.

3:32 Seems a little yucky, like marshmallow on a mushroom.

3:38 But you cannot admit your revulsion to me because I just gave

3:41 you the new fermented milk chocolate that all the cool kids are into.

3:46 And you know that you'll look like an unsophisticated rube if you spit it out.

3:50 So you swallow it and you force a smile and you say,

3:54 "Wow, where'd you find that?

3:59 Oh, I got it from Brown,

4:03 the new online small batch fermented milk chocolate subscription service.

4:08 No, I'm just messing with you.

4:10 It's It's a Hershey bar.

4:11 It's literally a Hershey bar.

4:12 I'm describing a Hershey bar.

4:14 [snorts] I've talked about this on the internet before,

4:16 but I wanted to make a new argument as to why I think many

4:19 of you are being hypocrites for the way you look down on this stuff.

4:23 If I wrapped it in craft paper and sold it

4:27 at Trader Joe's as Bragg Live Foods fermented milk chocolate or something,

4:32 you know, you'd buy it.

4:35 But also, I want to go deeper on the chemistry

4:38 and the like industrial history that explains why

4:41 Hershey's chocolate tastes so darn weird to people who

4:44 did not grow up eating it in the United States.

4:47 I have in my possession the chocolate patent which

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6:09 Thank you, Helix.

6:09 Anyway, chocolate.

6:11 Here's the big asterisk that I need to put on the whole

6:14 intro riff that I just did about fermented milk chocolate.

6:17 A Hershey bar might not be literally fermented.

6:21 If it's not literally fermented, then it is effectively fermented.

6:26 The chemical result is the same as if it had been fermented.

6:31 We can't know for sure how they get

6:33 there because Hershey's is a major multinational concern.

6:36 Their chocolate process remains one of the most

6:39 closely guarded trade secrets in the world.

6:42 But thanks to the rule of law, something too many of us take for granted.

6:47 There are some things that we are

6:48 legally entitled to know about Hershey's chocolate.

6:52 We know the ingredients because the law says

6:54 they have to put those on the package.

6:57 It's sugar, it's cocoa butter, it's various milk fractions,

7:02 and soy leithin as an emulsifier.

7:04 It's pretty simple stuff,

7:06 but they don't have to publish what they do to the ingredients

7:10 unless they wanted to patent any aspect of their process.

7:16 [snorts] Check this out.

7:17 This is Milton Hershey's patent application originally filed

7:21 in 1931 and it was granted in 1934.

7:24 A process for the manufacturer of milk containing products.

7:29 Authorship of this patent is attributed to this guy

7:32 Herbert Auding at a lab in Ohio.

7:34 But the patent was assigned to Hershey and that kind of thing is common.

7:38 It has long since expired because patents always expire,

7:42 generally after 20 years.

7:44 It's not like a trademark that you can renew indefinitely.

7:48 Hershey's will own the name Hershey's for as long as they

7:52 exist and as long as there remains rule of law.

7:57 But patents expire.

7:58 A patent is the exclusive legal right to use an invention.

8:03 We give you 20 years to make your money off of your invention

8:06 before we start allowing direct competition

8:09 from people who did not invent the thing.

8:11 If I'm a competitor, how am I supposed to know what I'm not allowed to use?

8:17 Well, the inventor has to publish their invention

8:21 in full detail in their patent application so that everybody else can know what

8:26 technology someone else has the exclusive rights to.

8:29 We cannot know for sure if this is how Hershey's makes their chocolate today,

8:35 but this is probably how they did it 100 years ago at least

8:38 because Milton Hershey had to divulge his secret in this patent application.

8:43 So to set it up, the application explains

8:45 that when you want your product to taste milky,

8:48 it can be hard to control or standardize

8:51 the flavors that you get from dairy products.

8:53 Indeed, we know from several sources that Hershey struggled

8:56 to get a steady supply of fresh milk for mass production.

9:00 He was bringing in milk from far away and storing it,

9:03 and refrigeration wasn't as good back then,

9:04 and he often found himself with spoiled, off-tasting milk.

9:08 The application says, quote, "When the chocolate or other material is first made

9:13 and has the desired distinctive milk or powder flavor,

9:17 the latter is found to be unstable or eancent

9:21 in character and to disappear after a short time.

9:27 Eancent is not a word that you hear much these days." So,

9:30 Milton Hershey was looking for a way to make

9:32 his powdered milk taste more milky for longer.

9:36 The solution that he arrived at was lipolysis.

9:41 Lipolyis.

9:43 Lipo being the Greek root for fat.

9:45 Lis meaning to break apart.

9:49 When a bacteria or you or any other life

9:53 form wants to access the energy that's stored in fat,

9:57 you have to break the fat down.

9:59 You got to break down the actual triglyceride.

10:02 A triglyceride is a glycerol on the left

10:05 holding together three fatty acids on the right there.

10:09 When you want to use those fatty acids for energy,

10:12 your body makes and releases a class of proteins,

10:15 enzymes called lipase, which break apart the triglyceride,

10:20 freeing up individual fatty acids to be used.

10:24 And the individual fatty acids are highly volatile.

10:28 They vaporize easily.

10:30 So you can you can smell them.

10:33 Fat itself is flavorless.

10:35 Much of the characteristic aroma that you get from butter and other fatty

10:39 foods is from a few free fatty acids that are floating around in there.

10:44 So Hershey's found that they could access

10:46 the milky flavors that they wanted for their chocolate

10:50 and probably increase the shelf life and all

10:52 that good stuff by lipolyizing some of the milk fat.

10:56 quote, "The lipolysis of the butter fat may be affected

11:00 by bacterial action or preferably by the use of lipolytic enzymes.

11:07 Now, this is key.

11:09 You can either introduce some bacteria to your milk

11:12 that will use their lipase enzymes to break down the fat,

11:17 or you can grow a bunch of bacteria in a factory,

11:21 extract the lipase enzyme from their little unicellular bodies,

11:25 pack it in a barrel or something,

11:26 and then sell it to a guy who runs a chocolate factory,

11:29 and then he can just add the lipase directly to his milk,

11:33 which is what Hershey's is telling us they did.

11:37 Actually, the author of the patent says that he

11:39 got his lipase from the pancreatic glands of edible animals.

11:44 No idea if Hershey's does that today,

11:47 but I've read that the the bacteria or certain fungal

11:51 species are the most common source of industrial lipase today.

11:55 Anyway, the patent gives them a specific process for treating the milk fat.

12:01 The process in the patent is as follows.

12:03 Heat the cream to 190 fah to kill the bacteria.

12:07 Cool it to 105.

12:09 Drop in the lipase.

12:11 Hold it for 24 hours until you've got about 10% free fatty acids.

12:17 Heat the cream back up to kill the enzymes, thereby freezing the process.

12:22 And then you combine this treated cream with other milk products

12:25 to get the properties that you're looking for in the end.

12:28 I should say right here that we do not know

12:30 for sure if Hershey invented all of this stuff himself.

12:34 There are stories that he might have stolen it from a Swiss chocolier.

12:38 No idea if that's true.

12:40 There's a story that the company acknowledges where an unnamed

12:43 worker from the factory helped Hershey to crack the code.

12:47 And for all I know, this patent doesn't even describe the real process.

12:53 Maybe Hershey patented a different process

12:55 just to confound any potential imitators,

12:58 which is something that competing companies

13:00 absolutely do to mess with each other.

13:02 But regardless, the result is milk chocolate that is high in the aromatic

13:07 free fatty acids that are characteristic

13:09 of fermented dairy products like cheese most obviously.

13:14 And the most obvious fatty acid that we

13:17 see in here is butyric acid, butter acid.

13:22 Once you've smelled pureb butyricaric acid in a lab,

13:26 you will recognize it anywhere.

13:28 It's very prominent in Parmesan cheese.

13:31 It's also prominent in human vomit

13:33 and cattle rumin and other less appetizing things,

13:37 which is why the usually non-American adults who are having Hershey's

13:41 chocolate for the first time often say that it tastes like puke.

13:44 But it's not puke.

13:45 It's fermented milk chocolate.

13:47 Or if it's not fermented milk chocolate,

13:50 it's chemically the same as fermented milk chocolate.

13:53 Instead of inoculating bacteria to get their lipase enzymes,

13:57 you just cut out the middleman and you add the lipase directly.

14:01 Do I know for sure that's what Hershey's is doing today?

14:05 No.

14:06 But I do know that this has a lot of butyric acid cuz you can just smell it.

14:11 I also know that the company has previously said

14:13 they do not add butyricaric acid directly to their mixture.

14:17 They could get away with doing that and then

14:19 listing it as natural flavors on the label.

14:23 The company has said publicly that they don't do that.

14:26 So, the butyricaric acid has to be a result

14:30 of processing that they're doing to the listed ingredients.

14:34 If they were fermenting the milk with bacterial or fungal cultures,

14:39 you would normally expect to see that on the ingredient label.

14:43 It might just say starter culture or it might list the bacterial species.

14:49 This Hershey's label lists neither.

14:51 So, I don't think they're fermenting with live cultures.

14:55 Enzymes, on the other hand,

14:57 do not have to be listed on the ingredients label because under US law,

15:03 effectively internationalized via trade agreements,

15:06 enzymes are legally considered processing aids.

15:11 If you use enzymes in your recipe,

15:14 you can list them on the ingredient label, but you don't have to.

15:18 Assuming that the enzymes are inactive in the final product,

15:22 assuming you've denatured those proteins with heat, for example,

15:25 the way Milton Hershey talked about doing in the patent

15:29 application that has another guy's name on it, but he bought.

15:33 So, all of the above is why I suspect that they're still

15:36 liberating free fatty acids with lipase enzyme over at the old Hershey factory.

15:42 But that is just an informed guess on my part.

15:45 The company is welcome to set me straight at any time.

15:50 Call me.

15:51 And I suppose that I should also say that real fermentation

15:56 using live microorganisms generally results in a lot of chemical byproducts,

16:01 not just the free fatty acids.

16:03 And therefore, there may be meaningful differences between fermented milk

16:07 fat and enzyatically treated milk fat depending on the use case.

16:12 But when it comes to the taste of chocolate,

16:15 this is what you would get if you fermented

16:17 the cream or if you enzyatically treated the cream.

16:21 It's effectively fermented milk chocolate.

16:24 And if such a dessert sounds intriguing to you for whatever reason,

16:28 well, I suggest that you give the Humble Hershey bar another chance.

16:34 Make good choices.