with cocoa butter. And the recipe always says  "dissolve sugar in the melted cocoa butter",  

but here is a problem. Sugar does not dissolve in oil. And I don't know why you said that recipe,  

why you ask me to do something  that cannot be accomplished?  

As a result, the finished products always  have "two layers", and the lower layer is  

always sweeter than the upper layer. Then one  day I tried another recipe calling for lecithin,  

and it perfectly solved this problem. The  question is, why? Let's find out with PAA.  

Hi, I am Shao Chieh Lo, welcome to what  people also ask, where I search for something  

seemingly obvious and share with you  some of its PAA, aka People Also Ask,  

which is a feature telling you what other  people are searching on Google that relates  

to your query. Today's keyword is Lecithin, and  specifically, the chocolate making implementation  

of lecithin. So I think it's a good idea to talk  about what is lecithin first. So what is lecithin?  

What many people don't know is that lecithin is  not a specific compound but a collective noun.  

According to the definition of lecithin in the  book "Lecithin: Source, Manufacturing, and Use"  

published by the American Oil Chemists' Society  in 1989. Lecitin is any group of yellow-brownish  

fatty substances occurring in animal and plant  tissues that are amphiphilic which means they  

attract both water and fatty substances, and so  are both hydrophilic and lipophilic, and are used  

for smoothing food textures, emulsifying and homogenizing liquid mixtures. Lecithins are  

mixtures of glycerophospholipids including a  bunch of hard-to-pronounce stuff.

I know most of you don't actually care about this,

so let's move on to our  next PAA: Do you need lecithin to make chocolate?  

Google's auto-generated answer is linked to  an article titled "Soy Lecithin In Chocolate:  

Why Is It So Controversial?" published by The  Chocolate Journalist which appears to be a website  

of a journalist who covers the news and trends in  the chocolate industry. According to this article,  

chocolate makers usually use lecithin to thin down  their chocolate mixture to make it more workable.  

And 0.5% of lecithin can thin down the  chocolate to the same degree as a mixture  

added an additional 3.0% or 4.0% additional  cocoa butter. But this article does not answer my  

question regarding how lecithin helps me solve  the "layered chocolate" problem. But I found  

two pieces of research that can answer this  question. A study published in the journal "Food hydrocolloids"

in 2005 observed the dispersion  of sugar in oily solvents such as cocoa butter  

or soybean oil, with and without emulsifiers  such as lecithin, and found that emulsifiers can  

effectively reduce the volume of sediment.  This study believes that this phenomenon is  

due to the fact that surfactants such as lecithin  reduce the strength of the attractive interactions  

between the sedimenting sugar particles. This  theory is supported by another study published  

in the journal Colloids and Surfaces in 2013. The  study added powdered sugar to soybean oil and MCT  

oil and observe the mixture using atomic force  microscopy and found that lecithin indeed will  

reduce adhesion between sugar particles dispersed  in oil. So after reading these two researches I  

realized, when you are making chocolate, your  goal is not to dissolve sugar in cocoa butter,  

because I promise you, you won't make it happen. Your goal  is to disperse the sugar as evenly in the mixture  

as possible and make it colloids. And surfactant  like lecithin can definitely help here. Another study  

published in the Journal of Food Engineering  in 2011 discovered another lesser known effect  

of lecithin on chocolate:it can speed up  the cocoa butter crystallization process and  

resulted in a more homogenous microstructure for  seeded chocolate. As to what is crystallization  

and seeding, I recommend watching another two  videos by kitchen matter, I will put the links  

in the description. So what if you don't want to  use lecithin for some reason? Let's talk about our  

next PAA: Can pectin replace lecithin? Google's  automatic generated answer linked to a research  

titled" okra pectin as lecithin substitute in  chocolate" published in 2019 on Journal Scientific  

African. According to this research, you probably  can use okra pectin instead! In this research,  

they use different proportions of okra pectin in  place of lecithin in the milk chocolate-making  

process and found that all the chocolate samples  from the various formulations had similar sensory  

properties as well as textural parameters (aka  hardness, cohesiveness, adhesiveness, springiness,  

and chewiness), which suggests that it is possible  to use okra pectin as an emulsifier to produce  

milk chocolate that is acceptable to consumers. 

Okay,  let's recap. Today we learned what is lecithin,  

why you need lecithin in chocolate making process, and  its scientific explanation and you might be  

able to use pectin in place of lecithin in the  milk chocolate-making process. If you made it to  

the end of the video, chances are that you enjoy  learning what people also ask on Google. But let's  

face it, reading PAA yourself will be a pain. So  here's the deal, I will do the reading for you  

and upload a video compiling some fun PAAs once a  week, all you have to do is to hit the subscribe  

button and the bell icon so you won't miss any PAA  report that I compile. So just do it right now.  

Bye!