Avid TikTok users will surely recognize the viral Dubai Chocolate Bar. Stuffed with pistachio-flavored phyllo dough, this tempered chocolate bar has been enjoyed across the world. And, Wednesday night, was also enjoyed by over 40 Northwestern Students.
The evening had two distinct parts. The beginning was a presentation by Northwestern’s Materials Science Club, who taught attendees about the scientific processes that occur when chocolate is tempered, complete with diagrams. As the evening went on, the bakers from Northwestern’s Cookology club took over, working with the student attendees to make the tasty treats.
This event was the brainchild of McCormick Junior Emma Sellin, Co-President of both Cookology and the Materials Science Club.
Emma Sellin: A huge interest of mine is the intersection between cooking and baking and science, like food science, is a really interesting field to me, so I just kind of threw the idea out there to do a collaboration between the two clubs I’m heavily involved with.
The materials science presentation was no quick explanation, either. Instead, students from the Materials Science Club read journal articles for explanations of tempering chocolate. Tempering is a process of heating and cooling chocolate to form a shiny product. For example, most candy bars sold in stores are tempered. They also looked at diagrams of the structures themselves throughout different phases of the tempering process. McCormick Junior Hayden Williams worked on this presentation and praised materials science for the taste benefits of tempered chocolate.
Hayden Williams: Not a lot of people know the science behind how chocolate is made and how you can actually manipulate that through tempering in order to make chocolate taste better and have better properties.
Williams explained that the texture of tempered chocolate is entirely different from a block of chocolate that you might buy at a store. But the science of baking doesn’t stop there. There are aspects of science intertwined in baking from beginning to end. As Sellin and Williams both explained…
Sellin: A lot of people say baking is a science
Williams: Baking is a science and a lot of that science is materials science.
Sellin: There’s definitely so many different types of variables that you have to consider when you’re baking, for example, like your oven temperature, how the heat is distributed in the oven
Williams; How they vaporize when you put things in the oven like baking soda and baking powder
Sellin: The science definitely informs a lot of decisions that you make during baking.
For Weinberg Sophomore Rohan Tayur, this wasn’t simply a matter of science, but of sharing both a passion and a useful life skill with others.
Rohan Tayur: By baking and teaching people to bake here, it’s like, if you give a man to fish, you feed him for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, they’re fed for the rest of their life. They now can feed themselves good desserts for the rest of their lives, and they can also help nurture others with the skill.
And it’s not just great life skills that attendees walk away with. In many cases, attendees at Cookology events are heading to their first event with the club. McCormick Junior and Cookology Co-President Reece Youhn always enjoys seeing the friendships that form when cooking or baking with one another.
Reece Youhn: I have to go start conversations and then by the end of the lessons I’m going around and I’m intruding in conversations because everyone’s already talking, everyone knows each other and it’s just so beautiful to see people come together around food.
For WNUR News, I’m Gabe Shumway.
