What happens when chocolate is undercrystallised?

The symptoms, effects and causes of undercrystallised chocolate

Tempering chocolate (or better yet pre-crystallising chocolate) is manipulating it in such a way that the cocoa butter in it takes on a stable crystalline form, making your chocolate ready for processing. Regardless of the tempering method you apply, always check if your chocolate is tempered perfectly before using it. You do this by dipping a palette knife in the chocolate and leaving it to set. If your chocolate hasn’t hardened after five minutes, it doesn't have the right amount of cocoa butter crystals in it.

If you’d use undercrystallised chocolate to create your chocolate products, they wouldn’t be glossy; and their chocolate shell would have a grey colour, dull spots, and would melt at the touch. Moreover, moulded chocolates and hollow figures would harden very slowly and would be very difficult to unmould. In short: it would result in a very unappealing product.

How to remedy undercrystallised chocolate

Bringing undercrystallised chocolate to a workable condition is pretty easy. You just need to add more cocoa butter crystals to it. In practice, you simply pour solid chocolate Callets™ (they are already tempered, so they contain the right amount of cocoa butter crystals) into the undercrystallised chocolate and stir them in. You’ll notice that the solid pieces of chocolate will gradually melt slower and with more difficulty. Continue stirring until all the pieces have melted. Your chocolate is now perfectly tempered and ready for use.

Another method of ‘seeding’ cocoa butter crystals to undercrystallised chocolate is by adding Mycryo to it. Mycryo is pure cocoa butter in powder form, which also has the stable crystal shape you need to make your chocolate perfectly workable.