On 'fermented' milk chocolate and elite hypocrisy

Imagine I told you I had discovered a new kind of chocolate. Fermented milk chocolate. All the cool kids love fermentation, which in a culinary context is the process by which we allow microorganisms to eat our food a little before we do, thus creating new chemical byproducts like acids and alcohols that can preserve our food for us and also make it taste really complex and interesting and good. The scientific definition is a little more specific than that. Fermentation definitionally happens without oxygen anorobically, which is one thing that makes like carefully controlled fermentation in a jar or something very different from just letting your food rot out in the open air. But anyways, fermentation is hip again now that it's no longer necessary for food preservation. We have refrigerators now and only unnecessary things can be cool. The cool kids have ascribed all kinds of health benefits to fermented foods, a number of which might actually be real. I suppose chocolate is hip in its own way, in part because of real or imagined health benefits. But when is chocolate ever not in style? I mean, am I right? I guess milk chocolate is not particularly cool. Milk chocolate is the chocolate that you eat when you're a little kid because it's smoother and milder than the hard stuff that you get into when you're older. The super dark chocolate. There's no room for milk in a bar that's hyped up as being 80% cocoa solids. So, yeah, milk chocolate is a childish thing. People know they're supposed to put away, but a lot of us retain an affection for it. And one of the biggest food trends in recent years has been to put an elevated spin on a childhood favorite, thus making it cool again for adults to eat. Think of the retro kids breakfast cereals remarketed for adults or the the craft fast food style burgers, that kind of thing. So once more I ask you, what would you think if I said that I've discovered this new milk chocolate where the milk is fermented like kimchi or smmancy cheese? Well, I reckon you might be secretly repulsed by the idea, but if I put it in a brown paper sleeve to coat it as being handcrafted or small batch or whatever, you'd probably agree to taste it just to show how sophisticated you are. And maybe you'd be repulsed by the combination of cheesy fermented flavors with a chocolate dessert, even though that is hardly unprecedented, right? Chocolate cheesecake is a thing. Chocolate cake with cream cheese icing, that's a thing. Chocolate chip canoli with a sweetened ricotta mixture on the inside. Chocolate and cheese is very much a thing. Perhaps you would remind yourself of that upon accepting my offer of some hipster fermented milk chocolate nonsense. And then you'd have a bite and then you'd think that doesn't taste like chocolate and marcapone or chocolate and ricotta. That tastes like chocolate and parmesan. There's an intense flavor in there that you associate with savory fermented foods, not sweet ones. And that clash of sweet and savory disturbs you. Seems a little yucky, like marshmallow on a mushroom. But you cannot admit your revulsion to me because I just gave you the new fermented milk chocolate that all the cool kids are into. And you know that you'll look like an unsophisticated rube if you spit it out. So you swallow it and you force a smile and you say, "Wow, where'd you find that? Oh, I got it from Brown, the new online small batch fermented milk chocolate subscription service. No, I'm just messing with you. It's It's a Hershey bar. It's literally a Hershey bar. I'm describing a Hershey bar. I've talked about this on the internet before, but I wanted to make a new argument as to why I think many of you are being hypocrites for the way you look down on this stuff. If I wrapped it in craft paper and sold it at Trader Joe's as Bragg Live Foods fermented milk chocolate or something, you know, you'd buy it. But also, I want to go deeper on the chemistry and the like industrial history that explains why Hershey's chocolate tastes so darn weird to people who did not grow up eating it in the United States. I have in my possession the chocolate patent which I've been reading reclined on a mattress from Helix Sleep, sponsor of this video. True story. We just had a guest stay in this very guest bed. And when she didn't get up in the morning, we got a little worried and then she texted us saying, "Sorry, this bed is so comfortable. I don't want to get out." She did not know at the time that this was a Helix or that Helix sponsors my videos. That is a true story. These are real super premium mattresses selected for your body and your sleep needs and shipped free in the US in a box. You just break the vacuum seal. If a new mattress isn't in the offing for you this winter, consider getting cozy with a Helix mattress topper. Throw one on top of your old mattress and address your back problems or your sleeping too hot problems. They have tons of custom options available. We've switched all of our mattresses to Helix mattresses and we've never looked back. If you're big, if you're little, if you're tall, if you and your partner are really different and you require different sleeping services, there is a Helix model available that can improve your life right now. Save 27% off sitewide with their President's Day sale exclusive partner offer. 27% off sitewide with my QR code or the link in the description, helixleep.com/regusia. Thank you, Helix. Anyway, chocolate. Here's the big asterisk that I need to put on the whole intro riff that I just did about fermented milk chocolate. A Hershey bar might not be literally fermented. If it's not literally fermented, then it is effectively fermented. The chemical result is the same as if it had been fermented. We can't know for sure how they get there because Hershey's is a major multinational concern. Their chocolate process remains one of the most closely guarded trade secrets in the world. But thanks to the rule of law, something too many of us take for granted. There are some things that we are legally entitled to know about Hershey's chocolate. We know the ingredients because the law says they have to put those on the package. It's sugar, it's cocoa butter, it's various milk fractions, and soy leithin as an emulsifier. It's pretty simple stuff, but they don't have to publish what they do to the ingredients unless they wanted to patent any aspect of their process. Check this out. This is Milton Hershey's patent application originally filed in 1931 and it was granted in 1934. A process for the manufacturer of milk containing products. Authorship of this patent is attributed to this guy Herbert Auding at a lab in Ohio. But the patent was assigned to Hershey and that kind of thing is common. It has long since expired because patents always expire, generally after 20 years. It's not like a trademark that you can renew indefinitely. Hershey's will own the name Hershey's for as long as they exist and as long as there remains rule of law. But patents expire. A patent is the exclusive legal right to use an invention. We give you 20 years to make your money off of your invention before we start allowing direct competition from people who did not invent the thing. If I'm a competitor, how am I supposed to know what I'm not allowed to use? Well, the inventor has to publish their invention in full detail in their patent application so that everybody else can know what technology someone else has the exclusive rights to. We cannot know for sure if this is how Hershey's makes their chocolate today, but this is probably how they did it 100 years ago at least because Milton Hershey had to divulge his secret in this patent application. So to set it up, the application explains that when you want your product to taste milky, it can be hard to control or standardize the flavors that you get from dairy products. Indeed, we know from several sources that Hershey struggled to get a steady supply of fresh milk for mass production. He was bringing in milk from far away and storing it, and refrigeration wasn't as good back then, and he often found himself with spoiled, off-tasting milk. The application says, quote, "When the chocolate or other material is first made and has the desired distinctive milk or powder flavor, the latter is found to be unstable or eancent in character and to disappear after a short time. Eancent is not a word that you hear much these days." So, Milton Hershey was looking for a way to make his powdered milk taste more milky for longer. The solution that he arrived at was lipolysis. Lipolyis. Lipo being the Greek root for fat. Lis meaning to break apart. When a bacteria or you or any other life form wants to access the energy that's stored in fat, you have to break the fat down. You got to break down the actual triglyceride. A triglyceride is a glycerol on the left holding together three fatty acids on the right there. When you want to use those fatty acids for energy, your body makes and releases a class of proteins, enzymes called lipase, which break apart the triglyceride, freeing up individual fatty acids to be used. And the individual fatty acids are highly volatile. They vaporize easily. So you can you can smell them. Fat itself is flavorless. Much of the characteristic aroma that you get from butter and other fatty foods is from a few free fatty acids that are floating around in there. So Hershey's found that they could access the milky flavors that they wanted for their chocolate and probably increase the shelf life and all that good stuff by lipolyizing some of the milk fat. quote, "The lipolysis of the butter fat may be affected by bacterial action or preferably by the use of lipolytic enzymes. Now, this is key. You can either introduce some bacteria to your milk that will use their lipase enzymes to break down the fat, or you can grow a bunch of bacteria in a factory, extract the lipase enzyme from their little unicellular bodies, pack it in a barrel or something, and then sell it to a guy who runs a chocolate factory, and then he can just add the lipase directly to his milk, which is what Hershey's is telling us they did. Actually, the author of the patent says that he got his lipase from the pancreatic glands of edible animals. No idea if Hershey's does that today, but I've read that the the bacteria or certain fungal species are the most common source of industrial lipase today. Anyway, the patent gives them a specific process for treating the milk fat. The process in the patent is as follows. Heat the cream to 190 fah to kill the bacteria. Cool it to 105. Drop in the lipase. Hold it for 24 hours until you've got about 10% free fatty acids. Heat the cream back up to kill the enzymes, thereby freezing the process. And then you combine this treated cream with other milk products to get the properties that you're looking for in the end. I should say right here that we do not know for sure if Hershey invented all of this stuff himself. There are stories that he might have stolen it from a Swiss chocolier. No idea if that's true. There's a story that the company acknowledges where an unnamed worker from the factory helped Hershey to crack the code. And for all I know, this patent doesn't even describe the real process. Maybe Hershey patented a different process just to confound any potential imitators, which is something that competing companies absolutely do to mess with each other. But regardless, the result is milk chocolate that is high in the aromatic free fatty acids that are characteristic of fermented dairy products like cheese most obviously. And the most obvious fatty acid that we see in here is butyric acid, butter acid. Once you've smelled pureb butyricaric acid in a lab, you will recognize it anywhere. It's very prominent in Parmesan cheese. It's also prominent in human vomit and cattle rumin and other less appetizing things, which is why the usually non-American adults who are having Hershey's chocolate for the first time often say that it tastes like puke. But it's not puke. It's fermented milk chocolate. Or if it's not fermented milk chocolate, it's chemically the same as fermented milk chocolate. Instead of inoculating bacteria to get their lipase enzymes, you just cut out the middleman and you add the lipase directly. Do I know for sure that's what Hershey's is doing today? No. But I do know that this has a lot of butyric acid cuz you can just smell it. I also know that the company has previously said they do not add butyricaric acid directly to their mixture. They could get away with doing that and then listing it as natural flavors on the label. The company has said publicly that they don't do that. So, the butyricaric acid has to be a result of processing that they're doing to the listed ingredients. If they were fermenting the milk with bacterial or fungal cultures, you would normally expect to see that on the ingredient label. It might just say starter culture or it might list the bacterial species. This Hershey's label lists neither. So, I don't think they're fermenting with live cultures. Enzymes, on the other hand, do not have to be listed on the ingredients label because under US law, effectively internationalized via trade agreements, enzymes are legally considered processing aids. If you use enzymes in your recipe, you can list them on the ingredient label, but you don't have to. Assuming that the enzymes are inactive in the final product, assuming you've denatured those proteins with heat, for example, the way Milton Hershey talked about doing in the patent application that has another guy's name on it, but he bought. So, all of the above is why I suspect that they're still liberating free fatty acids with lipase enzyme over at the old Hershey factory. But that is just an informed guess on my part. The company is welcome to set me straight at any time. Call me. And I suppose that I should also say that real fermentation using live microorganisms generally results in a lot of chemical byproducts, not just the free fatty acids. And therefore, there may be meaningful differences between fermented milk fat and enzyatically treated milk fat depending on the use case. But when it comes to the taste of chocolate, this is what you would get if you fermented the cream or if you enzyatically treated the cream. It's effectively fermented milk chocolate. And if such a dessert sounds intriguing to you for whatever reason, well, I suggest that you give the Humble Hershey bar another chance. Make good choices.