Chocolate Tempering How-To
13/11/2009 11:29
on: Beaux Arts, Cookery, Making Money
If you do tempering of your chocolates, you are on a safer ground and you can boldly gift them to friends and family because your chocolates will be smooth and shiny. If you have not done tempering, your chocolates will have a coarse bite and their appearance will be unsightly with whitish-gray blotches all over their shell.
If you decide to skip tempering, it will be unsettling expert chocolate makers because the fact is chocolates have to be imparted smoothness and shine since they do not have these qualities on their own. Conching smoothes out the particles of chocolate but tempering alone can prevent the formation of detectable crystals which substantially damage the quality of chocolates.
For chocolate to be considered genuine you’ll need cocoa butter as the main ingredient; this component in chocolate gives it its unforgettable rich and creamy mouthfeel. Cocoa butter comes from chocolate liquor, which in turn is extracted as a paste from roasted and ground cocoa beans. Cocoa butter’s presence in cocoa beans is more than 53%. If you don’t temper your chocolates, white spots appear on the surface of your confectioneries due to the breaking up of cocoa butter, spoiling whatever enchanting appeal that your chocolates may have.
Cocoa butter has a unique quality of crystallizing fatty acids at different temperatures. This makes it necessary to maintain exact temperatures not only during tempering but while you’re working on your candies. During melting, these crystals get dispersed and tempering stabilizes and makes them hold together snugly just to prevent blooming, dull appearance and crumbly texture of the chocolates.
Chocolate tempering can be done using three methods: tabliering, seeding, and mechanized.
Tabliering is a difficult method but is preferred by chocolate artisans. Chocolate bars are melted and one third of it is poured and folded on a marble slab. Once this is done, you slowly fold in the rest of the melted chocolate until the whole mass is worked upon to render even distribution of specific temperature.
The next method, “seeding”, is done by using an already-tempered chocolate as a seed to trigger the crystallization of free-moving crystals; they “copy” the crystal structures of previously tempered crystals. You don’t melt the entire chocolate at once but only start with two-thirds of it. The remaining one-third is cut into small strips which will serve as “seeds”. These seeds are folded into the molten chocolate until a uniform specific temperature is achieved in the whole mass. The crucial point in both tabliering and seeding is maintaining specific temperatures.
You should be wise enough to accept that tempering takes away a lot of your time and hence you may not sufficiently concentrate on honing your chocolate making skills. The third method, mechanized tempering, allows you the use of a chocolate tempering machine so that you can focus on skills-improvement. Chocolate tempering machines have computer chips to manage your chocolates’ temperatures.
