Chemical Activities in Chocolate Tempering
Creating chocolate candy confectioneries requires a more high quality chocolate than creating just simply chocolate cookies. Chocolates should be shiny, crispy, creamy and rich; tempering will give them these fine qualities as well as make them last for a long time at room temperature.
Un-tempered chocolate is prone to blooming; this is when white blotches appear on the surface of the chocolate. Aside from that it is also flaky and crumbly and won’t last a couple of days.
Tempering is required for the chocolate because it contains cocoa butter. Real chocolates have cocoa butter and the fatty acids in the cocoa butter need to go through crystallization process. The chocolate maker needs to be careful, though, so that no other crystals could form during the tempering process.
There are six different types of crystals that could possibly form during the tempering process. Chocolate tempering will be able to make the glossiness, crispness, richness, creaminess and smoothness appear. All the three types of chocolates, dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate contain cocoa butter that need to be tempered. The fatty acids in the cocoa butter crystallize and bond together at certain temperatures. Crystal bonding will depend upon the temperature provided by the chocolatier.
Just like any other type of crystals the crystals in chocolates have its own melting and freezing temperature. Freezing is the point of solidification of any liquid or substance. One good example is water, when water turns to ice; it needs to be heated at a temperature of 32F in order to melt. When you try to freeze water, it needs a temperature of 0F so that it’ll solidify.
We can therefore conclude that when temperature goes down, crystals in liquid will start boding and turn solid. The crystals will start to occupy the space that was recently occupied by the liquid molecules. The firmness of the crystals will greatly rely on the concentration and consistency of the crystals formed.
Crystals in chocolate also have this kind of melting-liquefying character. When it’s in its solid state, the crystals bound together tightly, taking a big amount of force to change its form and shape. A nice tempered chocolate will not melt in a normal room temperature of 68 to 77C. Once you try to heat chocolate, you’ll need a temperature of 96F to completely melt it. This temperature is just 2 degrees lower than the normal body temperature which is 98. At this temperature the crystals becomes loose and split up.
Chocolate temperature is crucial in chocolate tempering. Chocolatiers have to make sure that chocolates are in its exact temperature; they can perform this by depending on their calibrated thermometers. The best one would be the Mercury-Gauge Chocolate Thermometer. It is really made for chocolate tempering purposes and is very reliable; it can even scan a temperature as low as 80F. If you are determined enough in pursuing chocolate candy enterprise, you have get this thermometer for it will surely benefit you.
