Mystic Toad Press Blog

You may be wondering what is so difficult about making chocolate candies when all the items required for making them like a kitchen thermometer, a double boiler, a rubber spatula, candy molds/cookie sheet, and chocolates are within easy reach in your kitchen. Only if you know the entire process, you will realize why.

Preparation is easy enough: melt a pound of chocolate strips on a double boiler, taking care not to burn it by stirring continually; then transfer onto candy molds for shaping, or coat fruits for fruity cores; finally, air dry or chill to set. This is true if you’re crafting chocolate confections for loved ones. They forgive our subpar efforts quite easily. If your motive is to profit from chocolate candy making, then you need to exert more effort, and you’ll find the thermometer will come in handy for this.

You should temper your chocolate confections to give them luster, smoothness, firmness and a creamy texture as chocolates do not have these traits on their own. During the three steps of heating, cooling and re-heating of tempering, maintaining specific temperatures accurately is equally important; else, the chocolates will mottle and turn flakyuseless for selling.

Tempering temperatures of each variety of chocolate–like the dark, milk or whites–are different. What makes tempering difficult is also the equally unique crystallization behavior of the fatty acids in cocoa. They’re polymorphic at particular temperature ranges, a behavior which hampers the production of the type V crystals which turn chocolates into lustrous, creamy and tempting confections. Type IV crystals also form with type V crystals if temperatures fluctuate slightly, but since they soften more quickly at a lower temperature, you should maintain temperatures at exact levels to make more of the type V crystals more.

Both the options of manual tempering and machine tempering are available to you, but only with a chocolate tempering machine would you be able to handle huge quantities of chocolates hourly and daily. Artisanal chocolatiers prefer tabliering, the most difficult method of tempering chocolates, because there are markets that prefer handmade confectioneries. But if you want productivity and efficiency, tempering machines are the only way to go as they are equipped with microchips that control temperatures and hold chocolates tempered for a longer duration, even all night.

Every chocolatier, however, should have a working knowledge of tempering by hand because they may face situations that will require it. In tabliering, molten chocolate is folded on a heat-absorbing surface such as a marble slab to bring down temperature levels. In “seeding”, chocolate straight from the manufacturers, which is always tempered, are used to serve as “seeds” during crystallization, for the loose crystals to copy their form and structure.

If you are not careful in keeping a tight watch over chocolate temperatures during tempering, you could repeat the tempering process again and again until all the chocolates are tempered, something which artisan chocolatiers would attest to.