You may use a better grade of chocolate or even pure chocolate for making your confections unlike the ones you use for chip cookies or for chocolate fudge. But this high grade chocolate should be especially tempered to create a lustrous, smooth and velvety chocolate candy.
If you do not do tempering, your candies will be undesirably granular and crumbly and may be affected by blooming due to which a chalky sheen and white stripes will appear on the face of your chocolate candies.
Polymorphous crystallization will enable the fatty acids of the cocoa butter, the main ingredient for making chocolates, to crystallize into six types of crystals. Tempering prevents this from happening. Because all chocolates have cocoa butter, tempering therefore must be done.
The molecules in cocoa butter bond to form different crystalline structures. Which crystals will form and its number will be dependent on the temperatures you maintain. These crystals have their unique melting and freezing temperatures. When the freezing point is approached, the crystals of chocolates form and replace the liquid molecules until the liquid would’ve fully crystallized at which point the substance becomes solid. The concentration and uniformity in size of the crystals determine the stability of this new solid.
Tempering gives good stability to chocolate crystals and even at room temperatures, they remain stable. Only if the temperatures reach 96 degrees Fahrenheit, the melting point of chocolate, does disintegration of the crystals in the tempered chocolate takes place.
That is why, to maintain accurate temperatures, you must consider using a Mercury-Gauge Chocolate Thermometer as it could read temperatures as low as 80F.
The three stages of heating, cooling and re-heating constitute tempering. Non-maintenance of accurate chocolate temperatures will enable other crystals in proliferating, resulting in the non-formation of type V crystals and a failure in tempering. Type V crystals alone can give chocolates the shine, smoothness, firmness, and snap that they’re famous for. Tempered chocolates also remain in shape up to ranges approaching body temperature. Past these ranges and you’ll need to temper again as all crystals would’ve disappeared by then.
Cooling the melted chocolate or mush is done by working upon it on a heat-absorbing surface like a marble slab. This step enables formation of type IV and type V crystals that act as “seeds” to guide other crystals in their bonding work. Re-heating gently will remove the unnecessary type IV crystals and retain only the desirable type V crystals. Temperatures in all three tempering stages are unique for each variety of chocolates.
Chocolates should remain at the same accurate temperatures while dipping, molding and sculpting. You can set the tempered chocolate in a bain-marie or hot pad to retain these temperatures longer so you’ll have more time with your craft.