Tempering Chocolates the Easy Way
There are three types of chocolates:
- Semi-sweet and unsweetened dark chocolate made of cocoa butter, chocolate liquor and sugar. If cocoa solids are in excess, its taste will be bitter. You can add vanilla to flavor.
- Milk chocolate, boosted by milk, cocoa butter and chocolate liquor.
- White chocolate, which doesn’t have cocoa liquor but still has cocoa butter, besides the vanilla and sugar.
Tempering is an important process because apart from making it heat resistance and preventing blooming, and a dull, crumbly appearance, tempering makes chocolates shiny, velvety and crisp. Tempering consists of heating, cooling and reheating of chocolates. An accurate thermometer must be used for maintaining specific temperatures. If you do the tempering with enthusiasm, involvement and patience, you can definitely succeed in getting fine chocolates. But strict adherence to specific temperatures is what’s ultimately important. Take care: over-mixing may separate the fats and under-mixing may discourage the production of type V crystals. Chocolates must retain the temper during dipping and molding too.
Large quantities are tempered only by using huge tempering machines and for small quantities (less than 10 pounds or so), an affordable counter-top machine is enough. The main advantages in a tempering machine are complete automation and consistently high quality. You can also temper up to 10 pounds of chocolate per hour on a counter-top machine.
Aspects like how many persons will be using the machine for how many hours daily and your budget must be considered before buying one of these machines:
- Small time chocolate manufacturers and starters will find ChocoVision’s Revolation 1 practicable. Its capacity is 1.5 pounds at a time, with separate settings for each type of chocolates like white, milk and dark chocolates.
- For continuous work, an ACMC Tabletop Temperer better good with its additional features like a digital thermometer and a removable 5-quart stainless steel bowl. For generating the required heat, two 100-watt lamps are used. The machine can quietly temper up to 6 pounds of chocolate in an hour. You have front panel controls and digital displays for monitoring.
- For those who have more experience tempering, Revolation 2, similar to Rev 1 with regard to capacity, dimension and basic features, will be perfect. It has a thermometer display which you can adjust and an all night support mode to keep the temper until the next day to. You can also pause the process if you so like.
- Revolation x3210 that is made of stainless steel and with a tempering capacity of up to 10 pounds of chocolate per hour can be used for tempering larger quantities. You have features like pausing of the process and overnight standby mode in this model also.
