The delectable appearance of chocolates, such as the shine, creaminess, smoothness and that crisp crunch that you will hear when you try to take a bite are what your personally-made chocolate candy has to have if they are to be considered fine quality chocolates.
All manufacturers of chocolates, as well as the professional chefs let their chocolates go through the process of tempering. If the chocolate skipped this process, it will become crumbly, aside from that tiny white blotches will appear over its surface, which will make it look expired and unpalatable.
Chocolate tempering is very essential in the processing of cocoa beans. During this process, the fat crystals that can be found on the cocoa butter melts and stabilizes at different chocolate temperatures. Chocolate tempering makes fatty acids solidify and crystallize into one type of structure. But it could also be a tedious job when you do it manually. For those who are just new to chocolate making, it will surely fail-and-succeed affair.
You have to learn the chemistry comprising chocolate tempering. If you have done the tempering correctly, you should be able to create only type V crystals. This is the element that turns chocolate to its finest quality. You have to be aware though, that these fat crystals can crystallize into six different configurations.
Proper handling of temperatures is at the heart of successful tempering. As you may already know, chocolates are very sensitive to sudden changes in temperature. It the chocolate cool down or heat up beyond suitable ranges, it’ll most likely lose its temper, and you will need to undertake tempering all over again.
Chocolate tempering can be done manually in two different ways, either by using a marble slab or through the seeding process. In using a marble slab, you have to melt the chocolate and pour it onto the slab to disperse the heat until it reaches correct cooling temperatures. You can also do the process through the seeding method. Just combine non-melted chocolate bits (already-tempered) to the already-melted chocolate. The bits will serve as inducement for the crystallizing crystals to bind in a desirable fashion.
There are times that no matter how you’ve mastered tempering chocolates, some external factors will still affect your work. These factors could be moisture or the conditions in your work area. You can fix this problem by employing chocolate tempering machines to do the complex work for you. This machine can automatically and correctly regulate chocolate temperatures for you so you’ll be free to concentrate on the other, more important things in a chocolate candy making enterprise.