Chocolate Tempering

Chocolate tempering is a fundamental and at the same time the subtlest technique of working with chocolate, consisting in its controlled heating and cooling at precisely defined temperatures. Without it, it is impossible to create quality chocolate items.

The aim of tempering is to stabilise the crystals of cocoa butter, forcing them to form the “correct” stable crystalline structure (the so-called beta form, or form V). Correctly tempered chocolate has a whole range of flawless properties: it is shiny, smooth, pleasantly crisp (giving a clear “snap” when broken), sets quickly, releases well from moulds, and keeps for a long time. Untempered chocolate, by contrast, comes out dull, soft, crumbly, and covered with a white coating (a phenomenon called “bloom”). Tempering is carried out by various methods (on a marble slab, by seeding, in a machine), strictly observing the temperature regime for each kind of chocolate. It is an obligatory skill of every chocolatier.