To Temper Chocolate or Not To Temper Chocolate is always a question of the novice. Chocolate is sweet, bitter, creamy, satisfying and very temperamental. A splash of liquid causes it to seize, get thick, clumpy, unmanageable. Too much heat and the chocolate is burnt. So what do we do with this tempering thing?
The FAT in Chocolate is called Cocoa Butter. When you purchase a chocolate bar it is shinny, smells of chocolate, breaks with a snap and all the cocoa butter strands are solid, stable. When you carefully melt chocolate the FAT Cocoa Butter becomes unstable.
Tempering requires 3 steps:
a) Heating chocolate, to melt the fat structure, solid bar to melted bar.
b) Constant movement to begin to solidify the fat structure in the chocolate.
c) Gently reheating the chocolate to ensure the fat structure is stable.
