Steps to creating melt-in-your-mouth chocolate candies
Raw chocolate does not have shine or smoothness. Tempering is a unique heating process to give these qualities to chocolates. The chocolate breaks cleanly with a snap and not crumble. Improper tempering leads to blooming.
Tempering at right temperatures prevents formation of crystals that appear as blotches on the chocolate. Without tempering, your chocolate will be mottled, crumbly and grainy. Chocolate candy making starts with melting the basic chocolate at more than 90F due to which it loses its temper. Hence re-tempering must be done.
Since cocoa butter, the main ingredient of chocolates, contains cocoa solids, its crystals and the solids get suspended during the heating process. When melting takes place, the crystals separate from the solids and rise to the surface. You should give sufficient time for proper crystal growth.
Cocoa butter, due to its unique crystallization property, re-crystallizes into six different forms during melting. Each crystal form exhibits rapid domination at specific temperatures and hence you should closely monitor the temperatures during tempering. Type V of the six types of crystals gives the chocolate its snap and shine.
Heating, cooling and re-heating are done for formation of more number of type V crystals. Cocoa butter is heated to melt the crystals. The melted chocolate is cooled to form type IV and V crystals. Gently stirring the chocolate creates “seeds” and loose crystals bond with these seeds. When reheating is done, type IV crystals get eliminated and only type V crystals remain. Close monitoring of temperatures is done using a good digital laser thermometer.
Different types of chocolate require different heating and cooling temperatures. Tempering is done with methods like microwave, tabliering or seeding by hand. As a chocolate maker, you must also learn tempering by hand.
Tabliering or marble-slab technique is done by cutting the huge chocolate into small strips and heating it on a double boiler to a specific temperature. Half of the melted chocolate is poured on a marble slab to be worked on with a rubber spatula till it becomes glossy and smooth. Then it is cooled to a precise temperature. The remaining half is also worked till there is uniformity in temperature. The tempered chocolate is then dipped and molded. The tempered chocolate should not harden or lose its temper.
In seeding, you use the already tempered chocolate, or “seed”, to “inoculate” the melted chocolate so that type V crystals are dominant in the crystallization process. Temperatures must be monitored closely because lapses in this may lead to repeating the process.
Tempering is difficult because even an incremental change in temperature, over-mixing and under-mixing spoil the results. Even highly experienced chocolate makers experience difficulty in humid conditions. Artisan chocolatiers prefer tabliering because of its marketing merits.
The variables in microwave chocolate making are the wattage of the oven, the level of cocoa butter in the raw chocolate and the quantity of chocolate added to the bowl for the melting process, for which fixed parameters are defined.
Though the whole process is tedious, when you see the happiness on the faces of those to whom you gift the chocolate boxes, all your aches will vanish into thin air.
