Did you know chocolates Bloom?

Well, not in the literal sense like flowers do, but chocolates have the tendency to sometimes discolour under varied temperatures, storage conditions, moisture exposure and sometimes even if the chocolates are not tempered correctly at the time of manufacture.

Growing up, you would most likely have seen some of your favourite chocolates sitting in the fridge, fully sealed in its original packaging but when you open it, there is a thin white layer of white that surrounds the dark chocolate like a cloud on a rainy day.

And how many times have you thought, “oh no - this has gone bad” or “yuck, its growing fungus” and thrown away your favourite chocolate that you have saved to savour, straight into the bin? What if we tell you that you may just have thrown out perfectly good chocolate, because you thought it had spoiled? So what really is the white stuff on your chocolate and why does it happen?

This is a chocolate bloom. When your chocolate goes from warm to cold and back again, it can change the chocolates chemical structure. This happens because either the sugar or the cocoa butter and oils in the chocolate melts and separates from the rest of the chocolate and moves to the surface to form a semi crystallized or whitish layer over the surface.

There are 2 Types of Chocolate Bloom

Sugar Bloom : Can be characterized as a dry, hard white surface film on chocolate. Sugar bloom is caused by moisture in the chocolate coating. The sugar absorbs the moisture, dissolves, and evaporates. The sugar then forms larger crystals on the surface of the chocolate, which causes this dusty layer. While it affects the texture, it doesn’t make the chocolate inedible. You may be most familiar with this bloom as it occurs most on your åregular sugar laden chocolates, something like this: