Would you like a 3D-printed low-fat chocolate?

A Rutgers University scientist has developed a low-fat chocolate formulation that can be printed on a 3D printer in pretty much any desired shape. The researcher hopes this will be the first in a new line of ‘functional foods’ that are specifically designed with health benefits.

“Everybody likes to eat chocolate, but we are also concerned with our health,” said Qingrong Huang, a professor in the Department of Food Science at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “To address this, we have created a chocolate that is not only low-fat, but that can also be printed with a 3D printer. It’s our first ‘functional’ chocolate.”

The study findings from the Rutgers-led team of scientists have been published in the scientific journal Food Hydrocolloids.

For the study, the scientific team experimented with different ratios of the ingredients for a standard chocolate recipe to find the best balance between liquid and solid for 3D printing.

Chocolate is generally made with cocoa butter, cocoa powder and powdered sugar and combined with any one of a variety of different emulsifiers.

Seeking to lower the level of fat in the mixture, researchers created a water-in-cocoa butter emulsion held together by gum arabic, an extract from the acacia tree that is commonly used in the food industry, to replace the cocoa butter. The researchers mixed the emulsion with golden syrup to enhance the flavour and added that combination to the other ingredients.

Employing advanced techniques examining the molecular structure and physical properties of chocolate, researchers investigated the printed chocolate’s physical characteristics. They were seeking the proper level of viscosity for printing and looking for the optimal texture and smoothness “for a good mouthfeel”, Huang said. Experimenting with many different water–oil ratios, they varied the percentages of all the main ingredients before settling on one mixture.

Huong said he is already working on manipulating sugar content in the new chocolate formulation for low-sugar and sugar-free varieties. Ultimately, he said he plans to design functional foods containing healthy added ingredients — substances he has spent more than two decades studying, such as extracts from orange peel, tea, red pepper, onion, rosemary, turmeric, blueberry and ginger — that consumers can print and eat.

“3D food printing technology enables the development of customised edible products with tailored taste, shape and texture as well as optimal nutrition based on consumer needs,” Huang said.

Other researchers involved on the study with Huang include Siqi You and Xuanxuan Lu of the Department of Food Science and Engineering at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China.

Image credit: iStock.com/Olga Chetvergova