Before You Start Tempering Chocolates
You may have a wrong notion that chocolate candy making is simple. Of course, you have all the items needed to do this in your kitchen, like a cooking thermometer, a double boiler or an improvised one, and a steel bowl, a rubber spatula, cookie cutters or candy molds, and the main ingredient, dark, semi-sweet or milk chocolate.
You should cut the chocolate bar into thin strips and heat them on a double boiler. You should keep stirring the chocolate when it melts. Once the chocolate is melted, you pour the liquid on a baking sheet to dry it. This can be made into different shapes using a cookie cutter or candy molds. You can also make fruit-filled chocolate candies with grapes, berries, apples, etc.
If you are making these chocolate candies for your own use or the use of your friends and relatives, you do not need a thermometer. But if the candies are made with commercial intentions or for the purposes of gifting, you need a good thermometer for monitoring the temperatures during tempering.
Since the chocolates are not naturally shiny, smooth, creamy and crisp, they need to be tempered. The tempering process consists of heating, cooling and re-heating of chocolates. But even if there is a slight change in temperature during tempering, chocolates will distemper. Chocolates should remain tempered during their dipping and molding, too.
The tempering temperatures of the three varieties of chocolates like dark, semi-sweet and milk chocolates, are different from each other. The fatty acids of the cocoa butter crystallize into six types of crystals and these would multiply at six particular temperatures.
Only type V crystals can make the chocolates glossy, creamy and firm. Though type IV crystals also form around the same temperature, they are not of much use because they melt easily at a lower temperature that’s why you should have more of type V crystals to impart these great qualities in your chocolate candy.
Tempering can be done using a chocolate tempering machine or by hand. Large chocolates are typically tempered with a machine; only artisanal chocolatiers temper manually. But the difficulty in tempering by hand can be overcome by using a tempering machine, which was invented by a computer expert from New York. Temperatures are monitored by a computer chip on the machine and chocolates retain temper for longer hours this way.
But it is always better to learn manual tempering because a necessity for it may arise. Like the artisanal chocolatiers, you can do manual tempering by the tabliering method that involves working upon the melted chocolate on a heat-absorbing surface like a marble slab. You can also do manual tempering of your melted chocolate with the “seeding” method in which tempered chocolate is used as “seeds”.
But manual tempering is difficult and it involves maintaining specific temperatures, failing which you will have to do the process repeatedly till your chocolate is tempered properly.
