While chocolate will likely never be considered an overall healthy food, it would be good if there could at least be a lower-sugar version of it that people liked just as much as the real thing. Well, it turns out that the addition of oat flour could help make that happen.
Most commercial chocolate is approximately 50% sugar by weight, the other 50% being mainly fat and cocoa solids. This means that any sizable reduction in sugar content will make a big difference not only in taste, but also in texture and "mouth feel."
With this fact in mind, Pennsylvania State University's professors John Hayes and Gregory Ziegler created dark chocolate in which much of the sugar was replaced with either oat or rice flour, both of which contain sugar-grain-like fine granular starches.
"Starch is still a carbohydrate, so it’s not lower calories, but there is an overall reduction in the added sugar content, which has potential health benefits," said Ziegler.
In one blind taste test, 66 volunteers ate samples of chocolate made with either the oat or rice flour, and with either a 25% or 50% reduction in sugar. As a control, they were also served a regular piece of dark chocolate that contained 54% sugar.
All in all, the participants found the 25%-reduced samples to be much like the control, although they generally described the rice flour chocolate as being "chalky" whereas they thought the oat flour chocolate was smooth and creamy.
In a second blind taste test, 90 volunteers were each served three types of chocolate – a 54%-sugar control, along with 25%-sugar-reduced oat and rice flour chocolates. While the rice flour chocolate was liked significantly less than the control, the oat flour chocolate was liked just as much and in some cases even preferred.
"We've tried for 40 years to tell people to eat less sugar and it doesn't work because people want to eat what they want to eat," said Hayes. "So instead of making people feel guilty, we need to meet people where they are and figure out how to make food better while still preserving the pleasure from food."
The research is described in a paper that was recently published in the Journal of Food Science.
Source: Penn State
