The Chocolate Science That Stunned The Best Chefs

Seamus Blackley convinced Microsoft to build the original Xbox. Now he is growing cacao trees in a secretive lab outside Los Angeles and making chocolate that chef José Andrés called the best in the world. Blackley, a physicist and game designer, has spent about five years on the project with engineer Asher Zelig Sefami at Pacific Light & Hologram. Blackley treats every hobby like a research program. Ashlee Vance gets a look at a full size robotic Acrocanthosaurus built for a Steven Spielberg video game project, then hears how Blackley went from baking bread to working with scientists on an effort to recover microbes from ancient Egyptian pottery and reconstruct 4,500 year old baking techniques. The same stubborn curiosity led Blackley and Sefami to buy a cacao cutting on eBay, grow it in Southern California, and pollinate its tiny flowers by hand with tweezers. Then the chocolate science begins. The pair controls every part of fermentation inside a sterile system, turning bitter cacao seeds into brown beans that smell like gym socks and vinegar. A few minutes in the oven produces the aroma of fresh brownies. Ashlee tastes the finished two ingredient chocolate, and Blackley confronts the question hanging over the whole delicious experiment: should this remain a strange hobby, or does it have to become a business? SPONSORS Brex: https://www.brex.com/?partnerId=corem... Send Cut Send: https://sendcutsend.com/corememory/ IN THIS EPISODE Core Memory on Seamus Blackley's chocolate experiment: https://www.corememory.com/p/an-inven... Los Angeles Times on Blackley and Sefami's chocolate lab: https://www.latimes.com/food/story/20... Smithsonian Magazine on Blackley's ancient Egyptian bread project: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-... CREDITS Host/Writer/Producer: Ashlee Vance Director of Photography: David Nicholson Cinematographer: Camen Hodges Camera: Armaan Ajoomal Editor: Emmett Adler Assistant Editor: Anthony DeCapri Producer: Angela Almeida Executive Producer: Jaye Callahan and Ashlee Vance Head of Production: Mark Dudzinski Sound Design: Jon Sortland ABOUT THE HOST Ashlee Vance is a best selling author, filmmaker, and journalist who has spent more than twenty years chronicling science and technology for The Economist, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He wrote the best selling biography of Elon Musk and created the Emmy nominated series Hello World. On Core Memory he travels the world to drop into labs, garages, factories, and hangars and spend time with the scientists, inventors, oddballs, and startups pushing the future forward Subscribe to watch more Core Memory videos    / @corememoryvideos   Check out our podcasts    / @corememorypodcast   https://www.corememory.com/podcast Find Ashlee Vance at https://www.corememory.com/   / ashlee.vance   https://x.com/ashleevance Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:11 Who Is the Man Behind the Xbox? 3:24 A Robot Dinosaur and 4,500 Year Old Bread 5:46 Can You Grow World Class Chocolate in a Lab? 10:02 Tasting the Best Chocolate in the World