February 26, 2010
Know-How before Making Chocolate Candy
If somebody says that chocolate candy making is a simple process, that statement runs smack against actuality. With items that are required for making chocolate candies like a cooking thermometer, a double boiler or an improvised pan-and-steel-bowl boiler, a rubber spatula, cookie cutters or candy molds, and chocolates handily available in your kitchen, you may also tend to concur.
Preparing the chocolate is also straightforward: heat to melt the chocolate strips a double boiler or over your improvised double boiler, stirring the contents continually; air dry on cookie sheets; shape dried chocolate with the cookie cutter or candy molds, or robe fruits with chocolate; and chill briefly to set.
Your candies need not be perfect when you offer them to your friends and relatives. Should you wish to offer them on sale or as gifts, you’ll need to temper them properly to make chocolates attractive because the luster, smoothness, and snap are not natural to chocolates. By heating, cooling and re-heating the chocolates at accurate temperatures, tempering is done; else, chocolates will indeed distemper and turn mottled and unappealing for sale.
Dark, milk and white chocolates do not have similar tempering temperatures. Polymorphism is a crystallization behavior unique to the fatty acids of cocoa butter, which also happens at varying temperatures so that you face a major hurdle in creating type V crystals. Only if you produce a sufficient number of type V crystals can you have smooth, firm and shiny chocolates. The type IV crystals that form along with the type V crystals melt quickly at a lower temperature so you need to adhere strictly to tempering temperatures.
When large quantities of chocolates are to be tempered, you have to necessarily use a tempering machine. The artisanal chocolatiers, on the other hand, defy the enticement of ease and comfort with these tempering machines and prefer manual tempering as they have markets that look for handcrafted chocolate confectioneries. A tempering machine has a computer chip to maintain accurate temperatures and chocolates tempered with the machine hold on to their temper for a longer time.
Manual tempering will be useful to chocolatiers if the machine breaks down or if there is a power disruption and hence every chocolatier should learn it. In the manual method of tabliering, you temper chocolates by working them on a marble slab; and, in the method of “seeding”, you use already tempered chocolate bits as “seeds” to encourage proper crystallization.
If you are little careless and allow even a slight variation in temperatures during tempering, you will keep repeating tempering till the chocolates get tempered properly, a fact dreaded by all chocolatiers.
