Your heart will definitely fill with pride and pleasure when you successfully craft chocolate candy, especially when you’ve gone through the trouble of tempering by hand. Tempering by hand, a part of the process, is the more difficult phase because you’ll have to maintain specific temperatures accurately wherein most of the mistakes may occur. This may turn chocolate candy making a laborious process since you could keep re-tempering till you get it correctly.
Preparing the chocolate is easy enough. You melt dark, semi-sweet or white chocolate chips on a double boiler, while constantly stirring to avert burning. Fruits are enrobed with the chocolate melt or shaped by pouring them into cookie cutters, then you chill briefly or air dry to set.
It’s the fact that you have to maintain specific temperatures all throughout that may sap your enthusiasm and make candy-making hard work. You couldn’t leave out tempering because without it, your chocolates will not be shiny and crisp as they don’t have that naturally. Further, you may not be able to prevent blooming from occurring and this will make the chocolates ugly with crystal spots of cocoa butter appearing on the surface your confections. You need not do tempering if the candies are intended for personal consumption but if you’re making them for retail purposes, you cannot leave out tempering. Nobody will buy your unattractive candies.
Why? For starters, once you starting melting chocolates to make them pliant for dipping, they lost the manufacturers’ temper. So you re-temper. Moreover, the large quantities of fatty acids in cocoa butter form six types of crystals but by maintaining specific temperatures, you can prevent the other five structures from dominating and let only the type V crystals form. It’s the Type V that’s responsible for the gloss and snap but each chocolate type (dark, semi-sweet or white) forms type V crystals at different temperatures. Be alert though: type IV crystals also form with the type V. They have the same gloss and snap but they’re not as firm as Type V; they melt quickly at low temperatures.
In order to be sure that you’re maintaining accurate temperatures, you’ll need your thermometer to be calibrated regularly. But during tempering, small changes in temperatures may prove to be costly and you may find yourself re-tempering till you get it correctly. Just for making things easier for you, you may want to use tempering machines. These gadgets have computer software that takes care of holding temperatures even and producing only the type V crystal structures. If you use these machines, you will liberate a lot of your time, which can be used for following through your plans to perfect your small chocolate business and enhance the quality of your products.
