Eating and learning about chocolates in University of Alberta

Typically, a science fair consists of students, teachers, and a science exhibit to see or touch. But this fair at the University of Alberta makes you taste it.

Students in materials engineering are experimenting with how to make a good chocolate bar. From the ingredients needed and how long to process them, and just like a science fair, students have to explain what went wrong or right.

“The caramel or confection that we added, you kind of wanted to be amorphous like liquid caramel, but we ended up getting grainy caramel, so it didn’t really work out that way. But because we can explain why it failed well, like we’re not going to fail because we made a mistake,” said Taylor Boyle, a materials engineering student at the University of Alberta.

For the students, chocolate isn’t just a treat; it’s a complex feat of engineering. Their instructor compared it to real-world material like metals to see its material structure in the finest detail.

“We work with a lot of materials where if you want to melt something, you’re going up to a thousand or 1500 degrees, you want to break a piece of metal. You need a piece of equipment that’s very big and very expensive, and it takes a long time to get your samples machined … with chocolate, we can do the exact same test. We can pull chocolate apart. We can bend it until it breaks. We can look at it in a microscope, but it’s a lot easier,” said Beth Sterling Lee, material engineering teacher and professor at the University of Alberta.

As the students revealed secrets behind the perfect confection from bean to bar, it’s not just food for the mind, but also food for your stomach.