The Recreation Meister

At first glance, making chocolate candies is easy. All you need is a reliable thermometer, a double boiler, a rubber spatula, candy molds, and chocolate. If you want to make chocolate truffles, you can include heavy cream.

The cooking steps are simple, too. You break the chocolate bars into chips; put them in the double boiler to melt; and stir constantly so they don’t get burned. Once melted completely, you take them off the heat and pour them into a bowl if you want to dip fruits for fruity confectioneries or onto molds if you want multi-shaped treats. After a spell in the chiller to set, your chocolate candies are ready.

So what was preparing the “reliable thermometer” for?. That’s actually where the complications commence.

If your homemade chocolate candies are for non-profit giving, the thermometer’s superfluous. If you’re planning to sell confectioneries, then you’ll want to keep the thermometer so your melted chocolates are kept at all times in their specific tempering temperatures. It’s the properly tempered chocolate that’s worthy of trading for big bucks.

Chocolates, by nature, aren’t lustrous, creamy or snappy. Tempering does that to chocolates. All commercial chocolate manufacturers temper the chocolate that you use as base for confectioneries. However, when you melt the chocolatethe first step in chocolate candy recipesit immediately loses its temper. It becomes vulnerable to blooming, a condition whereby cocoa butter crystals float to the surface and become visible to the eye.

Cocoa butter has fatty acids that crystallize in six different temperatures. The need to keep temperatures constant comes from the fact that a crystal type dominates at a specific temperature. Additionally, Type V crystals have tempering temperatures for each type of chocolate (dark, semi-sweet or milk). You’d want to have the Type Vs because they’re the ones that give the glossy finish, firm body, and the best snap. Interestingly, Type IVs also proliferate during crystallization along with Type Vs as well as yield a compact structure and a good snap. However, it melts too easily compared to Type Vs which softens only near the body temperature.

You can choose to temper manually, in which case you’ll have to keep your trusty thermometer close by at all times. Chocolates respond quickly to changes in temperature so a degree off its proper tempering level and tempers are lost. So you temper again. Something you’ll be doing over and over if you get distracted by the art of creative chocolate design.

A chocolate tempering machine is an ingenious way around the precise temperatures predicament. These countertop appliances automate the formation of Type V crystals and keep your chocolate in its tempered state at all times. You won’t need to watch temperatures constantly and you won’t have to seesaw between checking tempers and dipping candies. You can leave all the complicated work to the tempering machine’s computer chip so you can concentrate on what you do best: making fine quality chocolate confectioneries.