Chocolate

I love chocolate. I don't mean Hersheys and such but the "real" chocolate. Most chocolates are full of additives; things I would call bulking agents. Suppose you are buying gold. You get 10 g of gold and pay the "gold price". What if the merchant can exchange 50% of the gold mass with some cheap magical ingredient? The seller could be making twice as much money. That's the general idea behind a bulking agent in food industry. Undoubtably, the chocolate industry does this too. Apparently, Hershey's milk chocolate is around 11% cocoa[1]. Then what are we getting? What makes up that 89%? I found what's in Hershey's Canada: sugar, milk ingredients, cocoa butter, unsweetended chocolate, soy lecithin and natural flavor [2]. According to the nationalpost [2], Canadians are label readers and that's why they removed polyglycerol polyricinoleate... which is a fatty acid-like molecule. Cocoa butter and unsweetened chocolate and chocolate liquor are expensive things. To bulk the overall product, other fats are added and chocolate flavor is diluted with other flavors. Chocolate should have at most four ingredients: chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, sugar, and maybe soy lecithin or other emulsifying agent. Technically, the emulsifying agent is not necessary, but a very small amount (< 1%) can typically stabilize the overall product to increase shelf life, sheen, and the snap.

The science of chocolate tempering is also really interesting. Polymorphism is important in chocolates. In short, when crystals form, the molecules making it up are arranging themselves in a very specific way. Recently, there was an AMA by some professor studying this - link.

ref:

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24276-2004Jun8.html
[2] http://news.nationalpost.com/life/canadas-new-hersheys-chocolate-bar-recipe-is-less-cheesy-gritty-than-americas-thank-you-very-much