Estratégias para impedir a formação de fat bloom em chocolate

Abstract

Considered one of the most appreciated sweets in the world, chocolate has great importance and economic value for the industry in this segment. Like any food, chocolate tends to present many problems until it reaches the consumer's hands, the main one being the appearance of white spots on the surface, in chocolate bars and filled bonbons. This problem is industrially known as fat bloom, having this explicit name as “blossoming of fat”, due to the crystalline networks of cocoa butter (the main fat present in the composition of chocolate), if they break and form these stains. The three main causes of this effect in chocolates are based on the product's poor tempering in the industrial environment, prolonged storage in which it exceeds its shelf life. And the main one, the fusion of fats by temperature peaks, by different time factors, which causes a polymorphism in the molecular structure of cocoa butter, forming crystals that, after re solidification, will migrate to the surface of the product. Even so, even though it is a recurrent industrial problem, there is still no specific protocol to prevent the formation of the fat bloom and/or at least alleviate this problem from occurring. Therefore, the present work proposes a method for accelerated shelf life testing, aiming to determine the conditions that maximize the formation of fat bloom as a function of the temperature versus time binary, from different chocolate samples, with different proportions and types of fats. To this end, a trial was designed to submit the chocolates, with different compositions in terms of amount and type of fat, to thermal variation of 32 and 36 ºC, under predetermined times. Chocolates with different compositions, being mixtures of cocoa butter and substitute fats, are more stable to larger temperature fluctuations for short periods of time. Chocolates with exclusively cocoa butter composition tend to be more stable at lower temperatures. Finally, no sample was stable to exposure to experimental temperatures, demonstrating that there must be an adequate control in temperature oscillation, in all stages of packaging the chocolate, after its manufacture.