If you’ve constantly encountered whitish-gray blotches on the surface of the chocolate candies you make at home, or your confections never achieved a smooth and shiny finish, or they always feel gritty to the tongue, chances are you’ve bypassed that one critical step in crafting melt-in-your-mouth chocolate temptations: tempering.
Most chocolate makers and chocolatiers take care to temper their chocolates before introducing them to their craving public. One reason is that chocolate isn’t naturally shiny or smooth. Although the chocolate making process goes through conching—the process where chocolate liquor is passed through several rollers to smoothen particles, tempering will prevent large crystals from forming. These crystals are crumbly, taking away that pleasurable mouthfeel that chocolate lovers like in their chocolate.
Tempering will ensure a smoother-textured, shiny-finished chocolate, worthy to be called “fine quality.”
So what makes a fine quality chocolate?
To be considered of good quality, chocolate should have a glossy patina. It shouldn’t have a dull, dusty sheen nor those grayish streaks or whitish spots, a condition called blooming. When chocolate is broken off, it must have a crisp “snap” and breaks cleanly; it shouldn’t crumble. Fine quality chocolate should melt in the mouth like butter, and doesn’t have a gritty feel to the tongue.
Chocolate tempering makes sure that you chocolate is not mottled, crumbly, or grainy.
Chocolate Tempering is Complex Chemistry
Chocolate isn’t naturally smooth or shiny. It needs to be tempered to have that delectable, tempting appearance and taste. The bar that comes to you from the manufacturer has already been tempered, hence the fine texture, the crisp crunch, and the glossy sheen. But the basic chocolate that you’re going to use for candy making needs to be melted to make it pliable for dipping and molding. When you melt chocolate, temperatures could exceed 90°F, and that’s when chocolate loses its temper. You’ll need to re-temper the chocolate to keep its attractive appearance and smooth texture.
For chocolate candy to be “real”, it must be made from cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is the one ingredient responsible for the rich, creamy texture of chocolates. Chocolate liquor, the paste that comes from grinding the roasted cocoa beans, contains about 53-60% cocoa butter.
Cocoa butter, the fat in chocolate, contains about 50% cocoa solids and when properly tempered, its crystals become suspended with the cocoa solids. Melting causes the crystals to detach from the solids and rise to the surface.
What makes the tempering of chocolate quite complicated is the fact that cocoa butter has unique crystallization properties—its fatty acids, when cooled down after melting, re-crystallize into six different forms. Maintaining temperatures during chocolate tempering is crucial because each crystal form dominates the crystallization process at certain temperatures—and it does so rapidly. Of the 6 types of fat crystals, the Type V structure produces the shine and the “snap” to chocolate.
Tempering chocolate then is about manipulating temperatures to ensure that you’re making as many Type V crystals as possible.
