Chocolate Tempering: Critical Aspects in Making Chocolates
If you always come across white spots on your chocolate, or it feels crumbly and rough to the tongue you probably skipped one important stage in chocolate candy making and that is tempering. Chocolates should be creamy, glossy and rich in texture, and these features could be attained only once proper tempering is done as these aren’t original attributes of chocolate.
Chocolate professionals are very careful in tempering their chocolates; they make sure that it’s done before they cater their chocolates to the market to make them luscious and tempting. Since chocolates are really not that creamy and shiny, it has to undergo several processes to make it real. Before tempering could be done, chocolate also goes through conching, whereby the chocolate liquor passes through several rollers to even out the particles, preventing large crystal formations.
Real chocolate must have cocoa butter. This is the ingredient that lends itself to making chocolates velvety-textured. The chocolate paste that is used to manufacture chocolate has 50 to 60% cocoa butter in it. If the chocolate didn’t undergo tempering, the cocoa butter will fall apart and show as whitish spots on chocolates, what is called blooming.
Tempering is also considered as the most decisive aspect of creating chocolate confectionery but because the fatty acids in cocoa butter melt and solidify at different temperatures, it’s also the most intricate, most labor-intensive part of the craft. The very objective of chocolate tempering is to make desirable crystals stable enough to be tightly bound to each other to prevent blooming from occurring.
Tempering can be done a number of ways. The first method is a type of tempering manually, which involves melting chocolate then working 2/3 of it until it becomes thick and achieves the right temperature of 80-82F. Once done, you now combine it with the rest of the melted chocolate with the same objectives of lowering temperatures and thickening consistencies.
Another easier way to temper manually is through seeding, the second method. This is done by melting 2/3 part of your base chocolate and mixing in the other un-melted 1/3 part, slowly integrating both until the while has completely melted, cooled and thickened to the appropriate temperatures. Seeding allows the crystals in the un-melted part to lead the way in crystallizing for the melted chocolates.
If you want to temper without worrying about temperatures, then the way to go is by using a chocolate tempering machine. Since chocolate tempering is a complicated process, this machine is so-programmed so that it does the whole process of tempering for you. You do not have to worry about anything, especially maintaining the correct temperature levels; you can just concentrate on molding your chocolate candies.
