For various reasons, I am currently staying in the UK and visiting London a lot. And while in an Austrian deli in London, I had a rather insipid Sacher-torte, the famous chocolate cake invented in 1832 for important dinner guests of the then Austrian State Chancellor, Prince Wenzel von Metternich. The apprentice chef who invented the cake was 16-year-old Franz Sacher, who had to take over the culinary duties that evening due to the sudden illness of the main chef.
Sacher was plainly informed by Metternich: “I hope you won’t disgrace me tonight.” So, not too much pressure on the teenager then. But Sacher took his chance and conjured up the confection of his lifetime, a chocolate cake so sumptuous people often salivate on hearing of a Sacher-torte nearby.
I have been to Salzburg to buy one at the Sacher Hotel and it was indeed an almost overpowering feast of chocolate. And the memory of that cake came flooding back in London when I was eating a poor substitute. And so, you now know this column today is about chocolate, but it is far from the usual gushy fawning over delicious chocolates.
In fact, it starts with a warning. Carbonyls Under roasting heat when preparing cocoa, new molecules like unsaturated carbonyls are formed from reactions of various ingredients in cocoa beans under high temperatures. This class of carbonyls is highly reactive and potentially genotoxic (able to cause damage to human DNA) when ingested.
The quantity of furan-2(5H)-one appears to be signific.
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