The Map Magazine

You can tell that chocolate has the finest features if it’s creamy, glossy, smooth, crisp and rich. Once you sink your teeth into it, you’ll hear that fresh snap of the bar as it breaks. Chocolate tempering imparts these features; it’s a procedure in chocolate candy making that involves melting, cooling and reheating chocolate to specific temperatures.

Chocolatiers and commercial chocolate makers temper their chocolate to attain that glossiness and creaminess as well as to extend the shelf life of their confectioneries. Once chocolate has not been tempered, it will be liable to blooming. Blooming is that condition where unappealing white blotches appear on the surface of chocolate as well as make its texture feel sandy.

Chocolate tempering is very essential in the chocolate candy making because this is the part where fat crystals in the cocoa butter attains crystallization the correct way. But chocolate tempering should be accurate and precise so it could really be a hard task when you do it by hand. This will be much harder for a new chocolatier–it will surely turn into a trial and error process. There is so much to be learned before you can really perfect the process.

First of all you must understand the chemistry involved in chocolate tempering. Once you do the tempering correctly, the fat acids in cocoa butter must create as much type V crystals as possible. These elements are the ones responsible for the best features of chocolate; you just have to be alert, though, because there are six types of crystals that may possibly appear during crystallization.

This is why you have to be watchful and aware when handling chocolate temperatures, especially if you’re working with different chocolate types. Chocolates are very reactive to temperature and just a bit of change will cause the chocolate to lose temper. You must have your chocolate temper meters or calibrated thermometers always close at hand during the process.

There are two procedures in which you can do the chocolate tempering manually: seeding and tabliering.

In the seeding method, you slowly mix in the solid chocolate bits with the melted chocolate. The crystals in the solid chocolate will act as magnet for the loose crystals to replicate during binding.

In the second, tabliering, you spread and scrape the chocolate mush over a heat-absorbing surface, usually a marble slab, until it is cool enough (again, to the correct temperatures) at which point, you can now reheat it again to be able to make the fatty acids crystallize into its ideal, tempered form.

Chocolate tempering is the major factor in producing the finest quality chocolate all the time. However, there are times that even if you’ve perfected the skill, some external factors like heat in the working area, moisture in handling equipments, and the reliability of your temper meter or thermometer influence the outcome of your efforts. All of these concerns will be solved by using a chocolate tempering machine which is controlled by software.