• Question: I wrapped cadburys dairy milk in tin foil then dropped it in a fire. Instead of melting it went black and when I touched it, it exploded into brown dust (and I burnt my finger) why didn't melt?

    Asked by metemercan2011 to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 16 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      I won’t ask why you were doing this! As someone who cooks sometimes, if you want to melt chocolate you have to do it very slowly to get ‘melted chocolate’.

      Why it melts is because of the fat in the chocolate melting – what you’ve managed to do is to bypass the melting and go straight to burning it. Burning makes the substances in the chocolate bond with oxygen. Because chocolate is a natural substance it is mostly made up of carbon, like coal, so when you burn it you get a sooty material which is black.

    • Photo: Peta Foster

      Peta Foster answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      Ouch… sorry to hear you burnt your finger! Yes it sounds to me like the chocolate was burnt, i wonder how long you had it in there for 🙂

    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      Sorry to hear about your finger…
      But I like this – it’s a pretty cool experiment (not that I support random burning of things) – but it’s good because the result didn’t really match what you expected, which was melting!
      I think Andrew covers the reasons why it burnt really well, I can’t say I had ever really considered this before.
      But I guess it seems fair since chocolate will melt quite easily when left in a coat pocket, or as soon as it goes in your mouth, and those temperatures aren’t that hot, really, about 30degC or so? I guess that’s why when I went away with work to Spain it was interesting to see there was not much chocolate out in the shops, any there was was at the airport in chiller containers! So yes, chocolate melts really easily and it seems you heated it so much it managed to burn!

    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      I’ve never managed to keep a chocolate bar around long enough to experiment on it…

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