So delicious in...well...almost any form, chocolate is notoriously fickle when it comes to melting it down for dipping, coating, or other candy making. Mess up the temperature and it can go from silky to chalky mess in the blink of an eye. Mark Bittman thinks he knows an easy way, but we're not entirely convinced. See for yourselves!
Tempering chocolate involves melting and heating it to about 110°, letting it cool to below 80°, and then bringing it back up and holding it around 90°. Once there, you can dip, coat, or drizzle to your heart's content - as long as the temperature stays around that magical 90°. If it drops below, you need to start all over again.
Why bother? Tempered chocolate coats things evenly, has a glossy look once it hardens, and snaps cleanly in the mouth. It also melts smoothly while you're eating it. Untempered chocolate tastes just fine, but it looks dull, often has gray streaks from the re-crystallized chocolate, and has a grainy texture.
Mark Bittman shows us how we can do temper chocolate on our stove top with just a pan, a thermometer, and a pile of chocolate. He melts just a portion of the chocolate to 110°, stirs in the reserved chocolate to lower the temperature (called "seeding"), and then heats the whole batch up to the required tempering temperature. He says the temperature will hold for several minutes, which is more than enough time to dip everything dippable in your house.
We still think tempering chocolate is kind of a hassle, though it is definitely good to know you don't need any fancy baking or candy-making equipment to do it at home.
P.S. Watch the video of Bittman demonstrating the tempering process - the last few minutes of him showing a batch of dipped goodies where the tempering went wrong is priceless.
Do you ever make anything that requires tempered chocolate? How do you handle that tempering step?
• Get the Article: Chocolate Gets Hot But Holds Its Temper by Mark Bittman
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(Image: Flickr member The Lightworks licensed under Creative Commons)
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Yup, seeding's the way to go; I'm with Bittman!
It can be a pain-in-the-neck process at first, but once you get the hang of it it's second nature.
I made this chocolate ferry (http://www.flickr.com/photos/pellet13/) in pastry school using just this process!
Notes:
Put ALL the chocolate in the bowl over a pot of boiling water, then turn the pot off and let it sit until the chocolate is about 2/3 melted. Then start stirring! The leftover unmelted chocolate will seed the rest, and by the time it's all smooth, it should be at the right temp (86-90 for dark choc, 83-86 for milk or white). If not, add a few more small pieces of chocolate. Easy!
One trick I learned is making sure the strawberries are dry- if they have residual water from washing them up, that will cause the chocolate to seize up & just be a huge, ugly mess.
I usually just go with the glass bowl in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time. :\
Works fine for me. I'm not picky about the glossiness of the chocolate and things like that....ur just gonna eat it!
I'm with you plumeria. I go for the quick micro method (although I haven't bought strawberries in months, this post is making me reconsider. I sure miss them!)
Wow, so that's the hard way PERIOD.
Chocolate is really cool, if you never get it above the "breaking point" (where the fats separate) you don't have to temper it that way at all.
As long as the temperature never gets above ~86-90 degrees to begin with, the initial temper of the chocolate will never go away. But as the melting point of chocolate is around 96 degrees you have to go slowly. The trick is that parts of the chocolate will melt before the others, so as long as you don't melt more than about 75% of your chocolate you can use the unmelted chocolate as a seed as you just stir it all to get melted.
Do like plumeria said above, stick it in the microwave, heat it for 30 seconds at a time until it's 75% melted, then stir like crazy for the next few minutes until it's all melted and smooth.
Voila, tempered chocolate...in about 5 minutes
I agree with blpeders. Just melt it really slow at a low temp and it doesn't get out of temper. Chocolate melts at below body temp-- hence the candy coating on M&Ms. I do it on a stove top over a pan of barely heated water.
As long as you don't overheat it most chocolate is already tempered thats how the microwave method works (as long as you keep an eye on it).
The seeding method works (and is really cool to see). I used to work at a shop that made their own chocolates, and dropping a bit of tempered chocolate into a batch of out-of-temper chocolate changed the structure in seconds.
Pfft. I've never had a problem with the microwave method.
David Lebovitz has a wonderful, well layed out, fool proof method for tempering chocolate. He claims to be the chocolate conniesseur's authority. He likes to brag, but he is very good at what he does.
http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2005/08/tempering_choco.html
Another vote for the microwave method. I used to do the more complicated techniques, and the microwave results are just as good, in my experience. I microwave it on low and stir and test every 30 seconds, to make sure no portions get too hot.