Innovations in Chocolate at Iowa State University

In Fall 2022, I knew I was going to have a hard semester. I was taking CprE 381, a class known for spending upwards of 40 hours a week on alone, alongside 2 more technical focused classes making it all the more busy. I knew this well before going into it, when registering for classes in the spring, I made the choice to take some class purely for fun as break from all the technical courses I had. Spending some time looking at courses available at Iowa State, I saw HSP M 393C: Innovations in Chocolate{target: “_blank”} and was immediately interested. I have always enjoyed cooking and the food industry, and while not something I would want to do as a career, I love to learn more about it. I also have a major sweet tooth, so a class all about using chocolate in the food industry sounded like a great pairing.

This class is a small, 3-credit, half-semester course that I had not heard of anyone taking before. Going into “the classroom”, a culinary test kitchen, saying I was anxious would have been an understatement. I had concerns ranging from being the weird engineer standing out, to just straight up being out of my league when it came to expected abilities of students. As my classmates started walking in and I started talking to them, that anxiety faded away. I wasn’t a lone engineer in this class at all, it was quite the opposite, well over the majority of the class came from highly technical majors taking this class for fun, and had what sounded like similar skills to my own. If I was out of my league, at least I wasn’t alone. Then the “professor” walked in. Chef Yann Queckenstedt, is the owner and operator of a local cafe, and is a PhD student in the hospitality management department. We started the class with introductions to each other, and talking about how the class was going to work.

When talking about the class Chef Yann, was very clearly aware how much interest this class would attract non Hospitality Management majors, and made sure everyone felt welcomed into the kitchen. He also went into further detail about how this class was going to almost entirely a hands-on class, starting with how to safely be in a commercial kitchen, ending with largely working solo on our final project.

Starting the semester after learning about commercial kitchen safety, we were tasked with making a chocolate sauce. We did this over two days, the first was watching and taking notes as Chef Yann made the chocolate sauce, while we as a class got to ask questions, and take suggestions. The recipe was definitely new to all of us in the class, but seemed simple enough that when we came back next week we would all be able to do make the recipe. Class came around next week, we got to ask questions about the recipe if we had any, then we were off to grab our ingredients and make the sauce with Chef Yann actively walking around the room to provide help. It seemed to start out fine, following instructions, asking questions getting help. The last step of the instructions were to take off heat, and continue to prevent the chocolate in the sauce from separating and solidifying, nothing to crazy. It started out fine, sauce started to thicken as a cooled like it should, and I just kept on stirring, this went on for a short time to continue cooling. At this point I was feeling good about completing the sauce, then disaster struck. As a I was stirring, it suddenly got dramatically hard to continue to stirring, and in mere seconds my sauce went from liquid to what can be best described as hyper aerated rock-like fudge.

Chef Yann came around, and I asked about what had happened to my sauce, as it was looking good for such a long time, and only at the last moment did it fall apart. He took a look at my “sauce,” and had me walk through the steps that I took. After walking him through the steps that I took, he first offered both compliments to things that I had done right, and suggestions of things to improve in the future, alongside adding that the sauce likely had too much water boiled off, and that is what caused the problem. As he was finishing talking to me, the person beside me was also nearing the end of the cooling and stirring step, all of the sudden his expression changed from calm to concern just as mine had done when my sauce had failed. It was not just the pair of us that had this happen either, the vast majority of the class had this happen to them, which Chef Yann used as teaching moment. Later in the class we would learn about tempering chocolate, and he described how similar small errors can cause major disasters in tempering chocolate, and to not be disheartened by them, but to learn from them, and try again.

Starting the next week we started started learning to temper chocolate, and also had to start brainstorming what we wanted our final project to be. The tempering chocolate was rather interesting, and really related back to a materials engineering class that I had taken, how we forced chocolate into specific crystal structures to have certain properties. The harder part to me was brainstorming for our final project, we were had to use chocolate to make something that we would present on the stairs of the student innovation center for all to see. I feel a long ways from artistically talented, and this had me worried about what I could possibly make that would be presentable in such a public manner. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and realized that just as a passion for cooking led me to this class, I could use my passion for Cyber Security as the base for this project. What that meant for the final project at that time I was unsure, but kept thinking on it over the next few weeks as class kept on going.

With the time of the class, we did not have time to temper chocolate, let it cool, and use it all in the same day. This means we would temper chocolate 1 week, let it set for a week, and use it the next week. The first time we made tempered chocolate, we made 2 batches, to get more practice. The first bathc I knew I had made some mistakes, and that the process was not done perfectly, and used that to learn for making the second batch. Coming back that next week, we all gathered up our sheets of chocolate, ready to take the silicone mats off, and unveil what was hopefully beautifully tempered chocolate. I pulled the mat of the first batch, and it was very clearly not tempered properly, being matte with cocoa butter streaks forming throughout. However to my surprise when removing the second, while not perfectly tempered, there were sections that were ultra glossy, and if isolated would have fit right into a chocolate commercial. It was not perfect throughout, with some general inconsistency, but it showed how I’d grown just from the first batch to the second, from having correct, to sections that were ideal. This is when my idea for my project hit me, I wanted something to show how I was actively growing in my skills in Cyber Security, and how I know I will not be perfect, but I won’t stop improving.

I really got attracted to Cyber Security in late high school entirely by accident. I was looking for background noise while working on homework, and stumbled upon DEFCON videos that ended up taking my attention away from homework instead of just being background noise. This really led me into pursuing Cyber Security Engineering, at pretty much the last minute before starting college with deciding in April of my senior year to go to Iowa State for Cyber Security Engineering. Two and half years later though, I was the vice president of the Cyber Security club at Iowa State, a part time employee at John Deere on a security team, and had just recently come back from my first DEFCON. I had grown both so much, with a number of key milestones being related to DEFCON, I realized that I wanted to use various badges from DEFCON setup in a way to symbolize my growth.

In the end I decided to use a set of three badges, that had meaning to me. DEFCON 29 which was the first DEFCON that occurred after I became interested in security work, and was the first year that I truly went out of my way and was eager to listen to the talks when they came out, and truly understood what some of the more technical talks were doing.

The second was the DEFCON 30 badge, as this was my first DEFCON that I got to go to in person, and made incredible memories with friends while there.

The third was a badge from WGCTF that I had won as part of the CTF, and while I was exhilarated at the time I won it because it was such a cool prize, and also was the first “real” thing that I got purely because of what I knew in the field. I look at, and can only think about how senior year me could have never imagined how fast I would grow in the next 2 years. While at the same time, I see how much I still have to learn, and how much I will continue to grow in the future.

These would all be scaled in size, with the WGCTF badge being in the front, sort of concealing the badges behind it. This is to symbolize that while I may be at a certain place at this moment, there were hidden steps that made me into the person I am today, and without them I would not be the same.

Over the next few weeks we spend more time tempering chocolate, testing out the design on our final pieces, and practice making those final pieces stand out when we they were presented. My tempering ability kept getting better, getting to point where whole sheets of chocolate were tempered, and having the significantly sized pieces needed for my final were possible for me to create, and cut out of.

The final day of the class came so quickly, with my piece coming together right at the very end. Alongside the piece that we had to make, we also had to make a tasting component that the judges would try. For this I made Peanut Butter-Dark Chocolate Truffles with a Dark Chocolate shell. This was a rather fun experience both making the truffles filling which was something entirely new to me. Alongside trying to use the dubious kitchen equipment in my apartment that effectively had two temperature settings off, and the surface of the sun, to do the specific temperature change required for the tempering of the shell. The first couple attempts were definitely a struggle, but after a few attempts I was able to get the filling made, and the shells tempered nicely. They tasted wonderful, and looked incredible, even getting used as the thumbnail for a YouTube video{target:” _blank”} by the Student Innovation Center.

The actual presentation had me filled with concern, showing up in the morning, and getting our projects loaded, and brought to the big main stairs, doing the final rehearsal of the short talk about my project that will go over the intercom for all to hear, being able to talk through my tasting item, and project to the judges without rambling on wasting their time. While I knew I never felt ready, my classmates and I took our positions on those stairs, and calmed ourselves. After taking my time to calm myself, and listen to my classmates speak, I was able to take the microphone in hand and go through my talk without issues, really boosting my confidence. Then as the judges were coming around, I made sure to keep their time with brief, but managed to spark an interest, as one of the judges came back after judging to talk more about my project, what it meant to me, and asking more questions. While I’m not ever very confident in my artistic abilities, having a judge come back to me specifically to talk more about my project, and how it related to me, really made me feel like I had done a good job.

Really this class was more than I ever could have hoped for. I came in thinking an easy and fun class to enjoy, but gained so much more than that from it. I got to learn new skills about chocolate, but also got to learn about myself when thinking about the project, and practice my public speaking skills in an way that very few people will get to do in their time at Iowa State.

Final Project Booklet