The pleasure of eating smooth, shiny and creamy chocolates is incomparable. But you must understand that these luxurious qualities come from tempering chocolates. The steps of tempering are heating, cooling and reheating. You impart temper to molten chocolate by working it.

Chocolates become crisp due to tempering. Increased shelf life and prevention of blooming are also the other benefits of tempering. Blooming results in the appearance of whitish gray spots, dull and crumbly surface and chalk-like taste in chocolates; tempering can prevent all these undesirable qualities.

Cocoa beans are the basic ingredient of chocolates and the fatty acids of these beans have the qualities of melting and solidifying at varied temperatures but due to tempering, these fatty acids will crystallize uniformly if you do it properly.

Tempering by hand becomes difficult because six crystals are formed from the fatty acids of cocoa butter and these six crystals dominate rapidly at six different temperatures during the crystallization process. Because of this, you should necessarily maintain specific temperatures during tempering. Only type V crystals behave contradictory to other five types of crystals and help to impart shine, crispness and smoothness to chocolates.

Since keeping correct temperatures is to be done without allowing even slight deviations, the chocolate tempering process is considered difficult. The reason is that even a minor variation in temperatures may lead you to repeating the whole process once again.

Out of the two ways of doing tempering by hand, the first way is to work upon the molten chocolate on a heat-absorbing surface till it gets tempered. The second way is tempering your chocolate using an already tempered chocolate as a “seed”. Both the methods require maintaining of specific temperatures during the process and even during the dipping and molding that follow this tempering process.

A tempering machine should be used if you’re considering mass production of chocolates. In a tempering machine, the advantages are immense. Hassles like maintaining specific temperature and moisture free environment are not there, type V crystals are produced more to make chocolates creamy, smooth and shiny, heating, cooling and reheating are done automatically and maintenance of specific temperatures are taken care of by computer chips within the machine.

The free time you get due to your using a tempering machine can be constructively utilized for planning to expand your chocolate confectioneries business.