The Bot Bin

A tempering machine is of great help to you because you can concentrate on the other aspects of chocolate making, with attention undivided. But learning to do tempering by hand will help you in emergencies. However, it is a challenging chore.

You cannot shirk tempering because the shine, smoothness and crispness in fine quality chocolates can only be had by tempering. You can also prevent the appearance of whitish-gray spots on the surface of chocolates, a phenomenon called blooming.

The solids of cocoa butter, the natural fat of chocolate, and the butter’s crystals adhere and get suspended together after tempering. When you heat chocolates to 90F, the crystals and the solids separate and the crystals alone rise to the surface. During heating, you also lose the natural temper of the chocolates and the problems of blooming and crumbling become real.

Cocoa butter’s fatty acids have a unique characteristic of re-crystallizing into six types of crystals and these six types of crystals complicate the tempering process because each takes over the process swiftly at six different temperatures. Hence maintaining specific temperatures during tempering becomes very important. Only type V crystals exhibit the favorable structures necessary for the shine and smoothness in chocolate.

You can make the chocolate ready for dipping and molding only by melting it. But the chocolate you have after melting has no more temper left hence you need to re-temper it. The two methods of tempering by hand are as follows:

1. Tabliering or marble-slab method, a French invention, is done by melting one pound of chocolate chunk, cut into 5 mm. strips, at a specific temperature. As soon as the melting is completed, you work half of the molten liquid on a marble slab with a rubber spatula until it’s smooth and shiny. The other half is slowly incorporated into the mixture until they have the same temperature, polish and silkiness. Only then can you use this tempered chocolate for dipping and molding. Since chocolate may solidify quickly, you should make sure to maintain right temperature with the help of a calibrated or a digital laser thermometer, throughout the process.

2. Seeding is a similar process but the only difference is that you use already-tempered chocolate as “seed” for “inoculating” your chocolate so that only type V crystals proliferate during crystallization. 75% of your chocolate is melted at the necessary temperature and the remaining 25%, also cut into strips, is emptied onto the molten chocolate until that mixture is visibly velvety and glossy.

Tempering by hand as against tempering by machine are wrong comparisons because manual tempering comes with the difficult aspect of keeping the right temperatures at all times. Tempering is all the more made difficult during the humid conditions of summer even for expert chocolate makers.