Speedy Gambling

Though chocolates do not have shine and smoothness on their own, they can be made to acquire them by tempering process. You can also avoid blooming and chocolates become crisp.

If the chocolates are improperly tempered, crystals and blotches form on them. Chocolates lose their temper during heating and hence re-tempering must be done.

Cocoa butter, the basic ingredient of chocolates, contains large amounts of solids and together with its crystals, these solids get suspended during heating. These butter crystals rise to the surface separately when the melting process begins.

Re-crystallization into six types of crystals is the unique quality of cocoa butter; these have a quality of behaving dominantly at six specific temperatures. Due to this factor, you should monitor temperatures closely and strictly adhere to the specific temperatures. Type V crystals are the ones that give chocolates the attractive snap and shine.

Hence it is necessary that you increase the volume of type V crystals through tempering. Type IV crystals that are formed along with type V crystals are eliminated and only type V crystals are retained when you do the reheating. For adhering strictly to temperatures, a digital laser thermometer is suggested.

Various types of chocolates require varied heating and cooling temperatures. Methods like tabliering and seeding by hand and microwave method are adopted for tempering. Chocolate makers must learn the process of tempering by hand; the benefits of knowing how are boundless, even if a chocolate tempering machine is available at hand to quicken the process.

In tabliering, the small strips that are cut from a huge chunk are heated to a specific temperature on a double boiler. After melting, work on half of the molten chocolate on a marble top using a rubber spatula until the mass is smooth and shiny. While this half is allowed to cool to a specific temperature, the other half is worked upon and then mixed with the first half so that the temperature gets evenly distributed to the whole. Then you can do dipping and molding to make your chocolate candy. The chocolate mustn’t harden nor lose its shine and smoothness while working on it.

In seeding, the process consists of “inoculating” the melted chocolate using an already-tempered chocolate or “seed” so type V crystals dominate the crystallization process. Again, it’s necessary to stick to specific temperatures in this also.

Keep in mind such variables like wattage of the oven, the level of cocoa butter in the raw chocolate, and the quantity of chocolate added to the bowl used for melting when tempering via the microwave method.

The factors that make tempering difficult are strict adherence to specific temperatures, avoidance of over-mixing and under-mixing and humid weather conditions; a chocolate tempering machine . Especially, humid conditions pose a challenge to even experienced chocolate makers also.

Gifting your chocolate boxes to others will get you immense satisfaction that will make you forget all the difficulties you faced when making the chocolates.