You know how it goes. One minute you’re happily stirring a batch of melted chocolate, dum dee dum dum… …and all of a sudden it starts to darken and thicken mysteriously. What the…? It seems to shrink in volume and looks oddly greasy. Then in a few seconds it’s seized up into a thick, putty-like […]
READ ONAnother good question in a long list of chocolate queries (I swear I really did make an Opera cake, shortly I’ll put up the pictures to prove it). Melted chocolate “seizes” when it comes into contact with small amounts of water. The question is: why? The answer is that melted chocolate is a flowing mixture […]
READ ONThat from reader Victor on the tempered chocolate glaze recipe below, which calls for a small amount of clarified butter. The reason has to do with the “fat bloom” I mentioned yesterday. Just as a refresher, fat bloom is what frequently happens when melted chocolate isn’t tempered properly, then re-solidifies. The random, unstable crystal formation […]
READ ONYesterday a reader and I indulged our very geekiest sides as we briefly discussed the way in which crystallizing molecules give off heat as they change phase from liquid to solid. But did you know the process works in reverse as well? Crystals that change phase from solid to liquid (which is to say, melt) […]
READ ONGanache isn’t strictly speaking temper-able, but the rate at which ganache cools and the types of crystals it forms are important. The more of the stable, “Form V”-type cocoa butter crystals you have in your ganache, the better its consistency will be. For that reason, a ganache should always be allowed to cool slowly at […]
READ ONReader Aaron writes: Quick thought about the tempering of chocolate. As you note, refrigeration messes with proper crystallization. However, as crystallization is exothermic, for molded chocolates (especially with poly-carb molds), it helps to pop the chocolates into the fridge about halfway through the cooling process in order to draw out some of the heat. As […]
READ ONReader Paul C. writes in with this: I was very interested to read your pieces on tempering and fat crystals. Does the fact that unstable [crystals] form at a lower temperature than stable crystals have anything to do with the softness of untempered chocolate? An excellent question, and the answer is yes, it does. The […]
READ ONReader Greg writes in with this tip on maintaining the temperature of a batch of tempered chocolate: I have tempered chocolate using the seeding method and found it really a difficult process. On a “Good Eats” episode, Alton Brown used a heating pad to melt and maintain the chocolate at the correct temperature. I tried […]
READ ONThe best way to learn how to temper chocolate is just to do it a few times. It doesn’t take very long, maybe twenty minutes including set-up, then maybe half an hour to an hour for the chocolate to harden, depending on how thinly you spread it. I suggest simply practicing on a parchment-lined baking […]
READ ONIt’s easy to lose your cool trying to create a perfectly tempered batch of chocolate. I know I usually do. The thing is, professional chocolatiers have high-tech mechanical temperers that keep melted chocolate at just the right temperature for hours at a time. The rest of us have to make do with the tools we […]
READ ON