Chocolates, with its irresistible creaminess, shine and snap, will never go out of fashion but you may not know that these aren’t original to chocolates but are acquired through that process called chocolate tempering. Heating, cooling and reheating are the three stages involved in tempering and you can succeed in these steps only if you maintain the specific temperatures throughout.

Tempering becomes complex when you consider that success comes only if you maintain accurate temperatures, a fact that chocolatiers acknowledge, because of several things:

• Maintaining accurate temperatures during tempering becomes necessary because the six types of crystals that form from the fatty acids of cocoa butter multiply at six different but specific temperatures.
• It’s only the type V crystals that you’ll need because only these make the chocolates crisp and shiny. These type V crystals are formed at a particular temperature which you should maintain very carefully and meticulously for each chocolate type.
• If you fail to do so, the remaining five types of crystals will start dominating and multiplying, which will be detrimental to your objective of acquiring only the type Vs. You shouldn’t allow temperatures to remain undirected and uncontrolled.
• You can choose either tabliering or seeding to manually temper chocolate but in both cases, maintaining is the major aspect of tempering that you’ll need to focus on; otherwise, you’ll find yourself repeating the process of tempering till you get satisfactory results.
• You should also take suitable safeguards against moisture and also use a good thermometer for monitoring and maintaining specific temperatures correctly.

Bulk manufacture of chocolates can be done only with the help of a tempering machine so that you can obtain consistently uniform quality in all the batches of chocolates you make. For maintaining the accurate temperatures during heating, cooling and reheating, a microprocessor is provided on the tempering machine so you won’t have to deal with this hassle during tempering. The time and energy saved by using a tempering machine can be devoted to work out clever innovations for improving your chocolates and to arm yourself well to face competition.

You should learn tempering by hand, though it can be a tricky process, because certain challenging situations may demand it (like a power outage perhaps). But producing consistently good chocolates and taking care of bulk deliveries on time can be achieved only if you have a tempering machine.