What You Need to Know Before You Temper Chocolates
26 02 2010Ignorant of the steps involved in making chocolate candy, people may comment that it is an easy process. You may also think so since you have all the items needed for making chocolate candies like a cooking thermometer, a double boiler, a bowl, a spatula, cookie cutters or candy molds, and your dark, milk or white chocolate right in your own kitchen. But it could be a grueling process.
You melt the chocolate strips cut from the chocolate bar by heating them on a double boiler, constantly stirring the chocolate during this step to prevent the chocolate from burning. Afterward, the chocolate is air-dried on a cookie sheet followed by the step of making of candies of various shapes with the use of candy molds or a cutter. Fruit-filled candies can also be had if you robe fruits with the chocolate mush.
If these chocolate candies are for your relatives and friends, they need not be perfect but if the candies are intended for making profits, you should have perfectly-tempered candies for which a good calibrated thermometer is highly essential.
Since chocolate do not shine and aren’t velvety on its own, you need to temper. Tempering consists of heating, cooling and re-heating during which you preserve temperatures at accurate levels. If there variations, chocolates distemper and you cannot produce attractive chocolates without it.
Dark, semi-sweet and white chocolates do not have the same tempering temperatures. Tempering process becomes complicated because the fatty acids of the cocoa butter could form six types of crystalline forms and each are dominant at their own specific temperatures. This is a major hurdle for creating type V crystals, which are accountable for the fine qualities of that mark chocolates. Unfortunately, type IV crystals can form along with the type V crystals so you need to be careful with temperatures.
A tempering machine is the only resort if large quantities of chocolates need to be tempered because the task of maintaining accurate temperatures is done by a computer chip, freeing you from the hassles of tempering manually.
Chocolatiers should learn how to temper by hand because emergencies may suddenly arise when you’ll need to temper the old way. Since it is on a marble slab that you cool chocolate during tempering, tabliering is otherwise called marble-slab method. “Seeding” is so-named because you employ already-tempered chocolate pieces to serve as “seeds” in crystal bonding and replication.
If you fail in maintaining correct temperature ranges, you will be forced to repeat the tempering process till the chocolates are tempered right. Manual tempering is tough only because of this step.
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