These moonlike craters are actually unstable crystals in a ‘complicated molecular material’ known as chocolate. Understanding how crystals form is key in crafting mouthwatering chocolate that has a vital and often overlooked quality.
People like chocolate for many reasons but perhaps they don't really directly think about it. They think about the taste of chocolate, they think about the sweetness of chocolate, but an extremely important property of chocolate is it's texture and it's property of being hard at room temperature but yet completely melting in your mouth.
This ‘melt in your mouth property’ makes a chocolate bar a unique type of solid.
We eat a great many different solids, a bread, pasta.
Chocolate is a very interesting kind of solid because it's one of the very few crystalline solids that we eat.
Crystalline solids, or crystals, have molecules, atoms or ions packed together in an orderly pattern and appear to have flat surfaces.
The crystal solids we eat are ice, sugar, salt, chocolate, and…believe it or not…butter, and margarine are all made of crystals.
Chocolate and butter and margarine are the fatty crystals that we eat, but yet as we all know they have really very different properties, of those three only chocolate is solid at room temperature, so you can pick it up, you can break a piece off of your candy bar, give it to a friend and you don't have to worry about your fingers getting all greasy. So if you imagine like picking up a pad of butter at room temperature, you can do it but it's not very pleasant.

The formation of the crystal in chocolate is actually part of the art of making chocolate.
The art of making chocolate into a solid bar that melts in your mouth begins near the equator.
There – often in the shade of coconut, plantain or banana trees – grows a fruit called a cocoa pod. The cocoa beans inside the pod are fermented, often in their own pulp. The local bacteria, fungi and yeast part of the fermentation process give the chocolate unique flavors.
Then the beans are dried in the sun, cleaned and shipped ‘round the world to chocolate makers like ‘Mast Brothers’.
The journey from bean to bar begins with roasting the beans, then the ageold process of winnowing or removing the shell from the cocoa bean.
Cocoa beans were winnowed by Mayans thousands of years ago, the beans would have been crushed and then thrown up in the wind and the wind would blow away the lighter shells.
To winnow shells in the New York City, the Mast Brothers developed their own technique.
Cracking the beans, extracting the shell, then the heavier nib will fall in the pan below.
The nibs are ground and made into a chocolate liquor – no alcohol content here – just an oldworld name for liquid.
The cocoa particles become suspended in the cocoa butter fat.
The beans themselves were actually made up of about 50% cocoa butter. under the weight of the stones and kind of the friction and the heat we will start to melt those cocoa nibs pretty quickly during that process.
At this point, sugar and other ingredients – such as milk in the case of milk chocolate are added.
The stone grinders conche the chocolate or mix it to reduce the size of the particles AND release the flavors and acids embedded in the liquor. The process can take several days.

We want like everybody wants that sexy, velvetty texture, so when we put it in the mouth it's smooth and melts, not sandy.
Conching is an important part of flavoring the chocolate, but leaves the cocoa butter unstable.
we don't have to worry about making the right kind of crystal and water for making an ice cube, we just put the water in the freezer and wait certain amount of time and then it crystallizes. But in chocolate that can't happen because there are actually six different kinds of crystals in chocolate. these crystals differ and that they have different structures but also different importantly different melting points
To make the cocoa butter stable, it goes through a tempering process…and tempering is all about crystals.
Only form five is needed, so chocolate makers slowly heat up the mixture until just below form five’s melting point, dissolving the unwanted forms of crystals.
What’s left is smooth chocolate, ready to be molded, unwrapped, snapped and eaten.
Chocolate should have a certain look to it, have a kind of a gloss and a sheen to it, it needs to have a snap so that if you make a if you take your little chocolate bar and unwrap it you can break off a piece of it.

CREDITS:
Director/Producer/Narrator: Emily Driscoll
Filmed by: Stavros Basis, Ben Effinger, Jon Foy
Lighting: Tony Sur
Music: Audio Network
Stills and Video: Artlist, Pond5, Shutterstock
Thanks to: Ken Branson, Robert Forman, Luke Groskin, Derek Herbster