Think about biting into a piece of chocolate. What makes it enjoyable? Is it the sweetness? The way it melts in your mouth? The crunch? The sound it makes? All of the above?
A team at the University of Amsterdam is attempting to use physics and geometry to answer some of these questions, and to—hopefully—create an even more enjoyable treat. Their result, a spiral-shaped 3-D printed candy, doesn’t look like anything currently on the supermarket shelf. But it may just be the future of food.
Why does this matter? Well, the next step of the research, published last month in the journal Soft Matter, involved giving the chocolates to a very lucky panel of human testers. The investigators asked which shapes the testers preferred and why.
“The more intricate the shape, the more crack it had, and the more they seemed to enjoy it,” [Dr. Corentin] Coulais says.
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Using geometry to tailor a food’s mouthfeel could allow researchers to use healthy foods with low carbon footprints (think lentils or tofu) to create interesting, palatable meat substitutes, says Coulais. The same techniques could create special foods for people who have trouble with biting or chewing because of illness or dental issues.
