Tempering by Hand or Tempering Machines?
Chocolate lovers concede the power of chocolates over them. It’s the shine, lavish cream, firmness and snap that do the trick. But the fact that chocolates don’t possess these qualities on their own and the fact that only a process called tempering gives chocolates these qualities may not be known by most chocolate lovers. The need to temper cannot be over-emphasized; it’s a process that involves heating, cooling and reheating chocolates at specific temperatures.
In tempering, you need to maintain specific temperatures and there lies the difficulty, the intricacy of which is felt more by beginners:
- During tempering, the fatty acids of cocoa butter, the main ingredient of chocolates, re-crystallize into six types of crystals.
- These six types of crystals have a tendency to dominate the tempering process at six different temperatures.
- It is the type V crystals that give snap and shine to chocolates and if the other crystals are allowed to dominate, these type V crystals cannot be produced to the required quantity. Hence you need to preserve correctly the specific temperature at which only type V crystals can form.
- Tempering by hand, using either tabliering or seeding, can go wrong if you’re not able to bestow your undivided attention on maintaining the right temperatures.
- Even expert chocolate makers may not succeed in manual tempering because moisture in the area or the accessories used, unreliable thermometers, heat and a slight lapse in accuracy may destroy tempering.
But if you are into the chocolate confectioneries business, your candies must consistently have high quality so that you can maintain good brand reputation. For this reason you must use a chocolate tempering machine so that the quality of your chocolates is uniformly good at all times.
These machines have a microprocessor that does the job of maintaining the right temperatures during heating, cooling and reheating. Apart from handling large quantities, these tempering machines can keep the temper of the chocolates for a longer duration. You get a lot of free time if you use a tempering machine and this free time can be used for ensuring quality superiority for your products and your business.
Despite having a tempering machine, emergent situations may demand that you should do tempering by hand and hence it is better if you master it. But investing in a tempering machine is a prudent one and will pay for itself in the long run.
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