You may have heard a lot of chocolatiers talk about tempering chocolate but what do they really mean by this process? I've read many books and even what they describe is very confusing and not that straight forward. Here is my experience with tempering chocolate and the things I have learned to do.
- Make sure you’re using the right chocolate. I wished someone would have pointed me in the right direction in the first place because store-bought chocolate isn't made to temper and is designed to take the high temperatures of baking. The brands to avoid are Nestle, Guittard, and Ghirardelli
- After many failed attempts I finally tried Callebaut chocolate formula 811 and let me tell you this chocolate is a lot easier to work with and is worth the wait and money! The key though is to look for a good Couverture chocolate which is designed for chocolate work. Usually, it has more than 30% cocoa content that makes up the chocolate.
- Get yourself some Cocoa butter that is food grade. Yes, there are non-food grade Cocoa butters on the market which are used for makeup and other products. We use Cocoa butter to color our molds which you do have a choice here. Get pre colored Cocoa butter or get a fat-soluble color and mix the two together.
- Get a good thermometer! I tried to use a decent candy thermometer and what I found was it took a very long time to get temperature of my working chocolate. Granted this is the most accurate way to get the temperature but a good infrared thermometer can help. Just know how these things work and I recommend using both.
- Make sure you have lots of time because once you start it is important to complete the process or you’ll ruin a batch.
Now then the thing I like about Callebaut is that every bag has instructions on how to temper their chocolate. Following their guide takes a lot of the guess work out of tempering. Is it foolproof you may ask? Well, but here is the deal, the more you practice tempering, the better you get at it. Don't get discouraged if a batch doesn't get tempered and don't throw it away, it makes a good ganache! The other day I tried to temper some expensive Guitard chocolate which didn't work. I was upset but, in the end, learned a valuable lesson. What that lesson is I'm still trying to figure out but hey this is chocolate!
There are several ways to temper chocolate but what I have found is warming the chocolate in the microwave at 30 second intervals and stirring it until everything is melted and I reach the proper temperature. For Callebaut 811 it is 45° Celsius. Wait a second, aren't you in the USA? and isn't everything done in Fahrenheit? Well, yes, it is but you have two choices here, convert to Fahrenheit or get a good thermometer that can switch between the two. If you are wondering 45°C is ~113°F. Just do a google search and you will get a better answer.
You will probably fail the first couple of times you try to temper chocolate, but this is normal. Have a little patience and keep trying.
How can I tell if my chocolate is properly tempered?
- There should be no blooming (white streaks or spots).
- It shouldn’t melt to the initial touch. Meaning if you touch it for a couple of seconds it shouldn’t melt. If you hold any chocolate for a few minutes, it will melt! This is why m&m’s have a hard candy shell.
- When you break it there should be a good loud/satisfying snap and it should make a clean break.
That it for today so let’s get busy and make some Chocolate!