If you love chocolates, you’ve probably noticed that good quality chocolates are shiny and snappy. Most especially if you know how to make chocolates and you usually make them at home. If the chocolate you’ve made contain lots of white spots over the surface then chances are you’ve missed out one process which is very important: tempering. Tempering’s the one responsible for the rich and glossy finish of chocolates.
All the makers of chocolates know that they have to be careful in order to properly temper the chocolates. Before tempering, it goes through the process of conching, where it’s refined and blended further to make it more pleasurably shiny and fine.
Chocolates that possess good quality usually have a very polished look and shouldn’t have whitish splotches, called blooming. When you try to snap it in two, it should break crisply. Quality chocolate must melt inside the mouth just like butter does.
Chocolate comes from the cacao pods, which when ripe, are removed of seeds and left out in the sun then fermented, which takes about 4-7 days. After fermentation, the cacao seeds are roasted and ground. Chocolates are not really that rich and fine in texture, it must go through the process of conching and finally tempering, to be able to get the desired creaminess.
Chocolates must contain cocoa butter to be considered as genuine. The liquor that comes from the grinded cocoa beans has 60% cocoa butter. During the process of tempering, crystals are stabilized to form a unique structure.
Most chocolatiers consider the process of tempering very complex because of the fact that the cocoa butter in the chocolate possesses a different kind of crystallization character. The types of crystals that tempering produces is categorized in six forms; the Type V is what’s responsible for the glossiness and creaminess of the chocolate so it is important to control the crystallization process to get Type V crystals more.
Tempering is done by heating up the chocolates and then cooling it down and reheating it once more, but all stages at precise chocolate temperatures, which in turn yield to the proliferation of the Type V crystals.
However, chocolates come in varied types, and each of them has their own temperatures for tempering. Because of this, a chocolate tempering machine is handy for automating tempering and producing consistent-quality chocolate candies every time they are made.
