You may whistle in delight if you are given smooth, creamy-textured, shiny and crisp chocolates but do you know how such qualities are bequeathed to chocolates? It is a process called tempering which consists of the triplets of heating, cooling and reheating. You work upon the melted chocolate to impart temper into it.

You increase the shelf life of chocolates and also prevent blooming if you temper chocolates. Blooming is a serious problem that dulls the appearance of chocolates by forming whitish gray spots on them, makes them crumbly and imparts an undesirable taste to them. This has to be prevented by all means and tempering is the answer.

The main ingredient from which chocolates are made, cocoa beans, contain fatty acids that melt and solidify at different temperatures and tempering is the process that can check this by making them crystallize uniformly.

It is the strange behavior of fatty acids that makes tempering difficult. These fatty acids of cocoa butter re-crystallize into six types of crystals and, barring type V crystals that benefit you by making your chocolates shiny, smooth and crisp, other crystals dominate rapidly at their own temperatures. This behavior makes it necessary for you to maintain correct temperatures according to chocolate types during tempering as well as during dipping and molding.

You need to increase the production of type V crystals that are the most beneficial to your chocolate confectioneries. But the task of maintaining specific temperatures is an uphill battle because if you fail to monitor even a slight change in temperature, you will have to redo the entire process of tempering.

Doing tempering by hand is by two methods. You can work upon your melted chocolate on a heat-absorbing surface to temper it perfectly. The other method is the molten chocolate is mixed with an already tempered chocolate, called a “seed”, so as to impart temper to it. Maintaining specific temperatures is critical during these methods also.

A tempering machine should necessarily be used if the purpose is to produce large quantities of chocolate. But using a tempering machine comes with a several advantages. Among others, you need not maintain specific temperatures since it is done by computer chip on the machine, moisture worry is not there, heating, cooling and reheating are automated processes and last but not the least, production of more type V crystals is enabled so that the chocolates acquire more smoothness, shine and crispness.

Since you save a lot of time by using a tempering machine, you can plan to expand your business in a big way.