Advertisement
Melting Tempered Chocolate While Maintaining It in Temper
Appears in
By Harold McGee
Published 2004
Tempering chocolate. To make chocolate with stable fat crystals, the cook first heats the chocolate to melt all the crystals. In one method, he then cools the chocolate to the temperature range in which only stable crystals can form, adds a portion of tempered chocolate to provide stable crystal seeds, and keeps the mixture warm until it’s used for molding or coating. In a second method (dotted line), the cook allows the molten chocolate to cool below the stable-crystal temperature and form a mixture of crystal types, then warms it to melt the unstable crystals while retaining the stable ones.