Food and Friends: Tempering

Our chocolate class today was a sort of introduction into the world of chocolate crafting. Contrary to popular belief, you cannot simply melt a bar of chocolate, put it in a mold, and expect to stick. In order to make those wonderful pralines, eggs, chocolate bunnies, and even bars, you must first TEMPER the chocolate. Large chocolate factories, of course, now have machines that do this for them, but it is important to understand the process if one wishes to be a master chocolatier.

The first thing we must understand is that different chocolates follow different rules. White chocolate is tempered differently from milk chocolate, which is tempered differently from dark chocolate. In class we mainly work with the finest of dark chocolates, so I will focus on that. In case you were wondering by now, tempering is the process of cooling down melted chocolate on marble to the JUUUSTTT RIGHTT temperature. This allows whatever chocolate creation we decide to make shiny, bubble free, and the right amount of crunchy. The taste is also altered (for the better of course)

First, choose your chocolate and prepare it for melting- chop it up real nice so it doesn't take hours.

Chop Chop!

Yum!

After this is done, you are ready to melt. Two methods were relayed to us: the first, and the more traditional, is the bagno maria bath. Put a pot of water to boil, and place the bowl of chocolate on top of this pot. Constantly stir, and make sure not to overheat the chocolate, because you risk losing some taste. We normally stopped at about 45 degrees. Another, easier, method is to simply use the microwave. Place the MICROWAVABLE bowl in the microwave and heat for 15 seconds at a time- after each interval, take the bowl out and stir. Finally you will get wonderful, liquid gold:

As you can see, we poured some of the chocolate onto the marble. 2/3 of the chocolate to be precise. Then, we spread the chocolate and gathered, spread and gathered, until it formed little solid peaks- this means it is cool. At this point take the chocolate and mix it back together with the melted 1/3 in the bowl. If your chocolate is between 30 and 32 degrees, you got yourself some tempered chocolate!