If chocolates are attractive with their shine, smoothness, luxuriousness, creamy texture, snappy bite and crispness, you should be aware that all these qualities have been imparted into chocolates by tempering. Heating, cooling and reheating are the processeses involved in tempering. You melt the chocolate and work upon it at a specific temperature to temper it.

To give chocolates a longer shelf life tempering is also done. Blooming occurs in untempered chocolate by which whitish gray spots show on its surface making chocolates dull, crumbly and having a chalky taste.

Chocolate making involves processing of cocoa beans in which tempering is an important step. Cocoa butter contains many fatty acids that melt and solidify at varied temperatures. When you do tempering, all these fatty acids form into uniform crystals.

Tempering by hand is a tedious process because of the fact that the cocoa butter’s fats crystallize into six types and these six types of crystals dominate rapidly at six different temperatures. You do tempering to produce more of type V crystals because these impart shine, smoothness, a creamy texture, quality and prolonged shelf life to chocolates.

There cannot be any compromises on maintaining specific temperatures as even a slight mistake will lead to repetition of the whole process. Though you may use thermometers for this, human errors may fail you.

Tempering by hand can be done in two ways. The first is to melt the chocolate and work upon it on a heat-absorbing slab till it cools to the specific temperature and gets completely tempered. The other way is to use “seeds” or strips of already tempered chocolate with the melted chocolate so that the loose fatty acids bind together.

But these methods require that you maintain specific temperatures during tempering as well as during dipping and molding.

If you are a producer of large amounts of chocolates either for gifting or for business purposes, you should consider using a tempering machine. The aggravations you face in tempering by hand like moisture during handling, and human errors in maintaining specific temperatures are not there when you use a tempering machine.

Type V crystals are produced more when you use a tempering machine than when you do tempering by hand and because of this, chocolates are smooth, shiny and snappy. Maintaining specific temperatures is done by a computer chip. Heating, cooling and reheating are done appropriately by the machine. Large volumes of chocolate can be tempered with the machine.

Since you are free from tempering by hand that brings lots of worry, you can now focus on improving your skills in chocolate making and to think of the ways for your business to improve exponentially.