What Chocolate Looks Like When Viewed Under a Scanning Electron Microscope

Graduate student Jennifer Dailey talks about a class she has been teaching at Johns Hopkins University that focuses on the subject of chocolate, what it consists of, its various melting points and even what it looks like under a scanning electron microscope.

By heating and cooling the chocolate up to various temperatures..we’re able to create the exact crystal structure that we want. We put it under a scanning electron microscope. We’re going to be able to image down to microns even nanometers. And believe me chocolate does not look like you expect it to look. We see something that looks like globules mixed in with something that looks like pure crystals– like a diamond would look. Those crystals are actually just chunks of sugar and the globules are the cocoa butter that it’s embedded in. If I look at this I really don’t want to eat it. But we all know in real life we probably do.

via The Presurfer