Martial Arts Mania

Temptations from chocolates come from that palatable appearance that it possesses such as creaminess, crispness, richness and glossiness aside from the sharp, clear snap that you will get once you break it. Chocolate tempering is largely responsible for these tempting features. Tempering is the end-stage process of melting, cooling and reheating chocolate once again, all under particularly correct temperatures.

All chocolate makers and expert chocolatiers make certain that their chocolate goes through tempering because chocolate that hasn’t been tempered has a tendency to bloom, a condition where grayish-white blotches suddenly appear on its surface. Aside from that, un-tempered chocolate also has a grainy texture.

Chocolate tempering is thus considered as a very important procedure in chocolate candy making, particularly as the fat crystals in cocoa butter have polymorphic characteristics: they can solidify at different chocolate temperatures, into varied configurations. Tempering makes the fatty acids produce standardized crystals that produce chocolate’s tempting features.

If you properly tempered your chocolate, it should be able to produce lots of type V crystals; these types of crystals are the ones responsible for the best features of your chocolate such as the glossy patina, creaminess, richness and even a providential shelf life. However, you need to know that during the crystallization process, there is a possibility that the six types of crystals may appear, and you have to avoid it, by simply handling the different temperatures correctly.

You must be aware of the correct handling of temperatures, especially if you are working with all the different types of chocolates. Chocolate is extremely sensitive to any kind of change in temperature. If it will experience any kind of alteration, the chocolate will lose the temper, making you do the process all over again.

Chocolate tempering must be an accurate process that’s why it’s considered as a very tedious task, especially when done manually. For beginning chocolatiers, there will be a lot of misses before there could be hits. One thing that could help is to procure chocolate temper meters or regularly calibrate your thermometers so that you get the temperatures right.

There are two manners to chocolate tempering by hand: tabliering and seeding.

Tabliering involves melting chocolate then gently mixing it on a marble slab to diffuse heat and therefore cool it down all while keeping correct temperatures. With seeding, un-melted chocolate (which comes tempered form the manufacturers) is mixed with melted chocolate so that the crystals in the latter can “photocopy” the crystalline formations in the former.

Sometimes you will notice that tempering results look odd, even if you’ve already done the process correctly and accurately. This is probably because of the moisture and the heat conditions in the production area. This can be avoided by employing the aid of a chocolate tempering machine which is programmed to “read” and maintain accurate temperatures all the time, or adjust it to necessary levels. A chocolate tempering machine is always a wise investment, particularly if making chocolate candy is a hobby or livelihood.