In this week's WSJ column, I wrote about how the engineered weaknesses in chocolate bars (the grooves) help break it, & now I have an inbox of cross people telling me they break chocolate by bending towards the groove (pushing down directly on the groove), rather than pushing on the side that doesn’t have a groove. I spent a lot of time drawing diagrams of cracks & fracture zones & it's never occurred to me to push on the groove. How do you do this?
@helenczerski I chose 1, but sometimes I use option 2 by leaving the bar on the table and using just a single hand to exert pressure. In particular hard dark chocolate is easier to break that way.
On that topic: anybody else likes to sign a petition that "Die Gute Schokolade" changes their grooves?:)
They have this annoying gimmick where the blocks are fairly large and irregularly sized.
Means you have to break the blocks without grooves.
@helenczerski i tend to push on the opposite side but only because I usually open with it flat on a table and more times than it seems chance explains, when i take the wrapping off it's groove-side-down and i can't be bothered to flip it over. :-) i'm guessing it really doesn't matter which side you push, just that it’s thinner at those points.
(I imagine the groove-pushers aren't pushing in the groove, just with their finger(s) over it? that's what i do when it opens that way up…)
@StrangeNoises I think that it does matter. The stress concentration at the crack tip is what gets it started, and I think you'll use less energy if the groove is on the outside of the bend. But maybe it depends on how hard the chocolate is.
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