Tempering

Tempering is the perfect alignment of the cocoa butter crystals in chocolate. Cocoa butter is intrinsically unstable and unpredictable: tempering stabilises the ‘good’ crystals. The process involves melting, cooling and moving the chocolate to create an orderly structure of crystals, resulting in well behaved chocolate that will do what you want it to do: set quickly, contract away from the surface of a mould and give you shiny, crisp chocolate.

Tempered chocolate...

— keeps its shine

— gives an audible ‘snap’ when broken