That chocolate lovers will risk expanded waistlines and bulging love handles just goes to show the power of fine quality chocolates over its aficionados. But did you know that chocolates, on its own, aren’t lustrous, velvety, and crisp as we see them on a shop shelf? It is simply due to tempering that chocolates achieve these tempting attributes.
Tempering is that serial process which involves melting, cooling and reheating chocolates at required temperatures (preserved accurately while working) to create the base crystals that yield to attractive chocolates. Tempering’s other benefit is an extended shelf-life to chocolates. Blooming-the reason behind dusty, splotchy, and crumbly chocolates-is also avoided by tempering. Most assuredly, chocolates affected by blooming won’t sell.
The need for tempering chocolates has everything to do with cocoa butter, the raw material in chocolate. Cocoa butter has fatty acids which have polymorphic crystallization characteristics-meaning the resulting crystals can take on six varying shapes when temperatures fluctuates, obstructing the creation of your objective crystal-the type V crystals-which is the reason for chocolate’s shine, snap, and creaminess. Tempering will control the temperatures acting on them and thus control what crystal structure proliferates.
Experts themselves find manual tempering tough at times because, if www.honmac.com attentions wander, chocolate could get ruined so easily and tempering would have to be done over again. Although there are already compact tempering machines available on the market, beginning chocolatiers and chocolate enthusiasts alike should oil press venture into manual tempering territory a wee bit, especially for those times when power outages won’t get these new-fangled machines to work.
Manual chocolate tempering can be done two ways. One method involves cooling chocolate mush on a marble slab to draw the heat and therefore encourage crystallization. The other method involves “inoculating” the melted chocolate with “seeds” so that developing crystals can copy its structure and form the right crystals necessary for an attractive finish.
In both methods, it is crucial to keep specific temperatures constant and accurate while working on the chocolates. Chocolates are so sensitive to heat that minor temperature variances could ruin the chocolate mush and compel you to repeat tempering again if you want chocolates to be appealing and tempting. A temper meter and a good calibrated thermometer may be useful in this case.
Still, chocolate tempering even by an expert could be exposed to uncontrollable external factors such as humidity, inaccurate gauges, and worker skill. The best way to respond to this, especially if your enterprise regularly handles large chocolate volumes hourly, is to invest in a chocolate tempering machine.
Because a tempering machine only produces type V crystals whenever you load chocolates onto its bowl, you’ll be assured of a consistent-quality product every time you make chocolate candies. A microprocessor will keep temperatures accurate as well as retain tempers longer-even all night-without you sweating over such factors. What’s more, you get to have lots of time focusing on offering better products to your customers, thereby allowing you to grow your business bigger.