The importance of tempering chocolate

Why is melting chocolate not enough?

If you simply melted your chocolate instead of tempering it before processing, it would not yield the results that make an irresistibly appealing chocolate product. It would take a long time (hours even) to harden, and the chocolate shell would look dull and melt easily. Moreover, your chocolate would be a bit rubbery, instead of having that delicious snap when you bite it, and would have poor contraction properties, causing it to unmould with difficulty.

How to temper chocolate

The purpose of tempering chocolate is to pre-crystallise the cocoa butter in it, which is important to make your chocolate ready for processing. During tempering, the cocoa butter in the chocolate takes on a stable crystalline form. This guarantees a perfect finished product with a satin gloss and a hard snap. It also makes the chocolate contract during cooling, rendering unmoulding it a lot easier.

Watch our tutorials about tempering chocolate to learn different tempering techniques.