Thou art more lovely and more tempered
We have some silicon molds for chocolates, which we use to make the occasional sweet. You know, melting chocolate, making ganache, pouring it in, etc.
But one thing I never learned was to temper chocolate. Just like steel, chocolate forms crystals as it cools down. And if you cool it down slowly from the right temperature (a process called “tempering”), then it will form harder, bigger crystals than when you just heat it up and let it cool down again - also just like steel. These harder crystals is what give a chocolate bonbon it’s “crunch”.
So upto now, all of our chocolate work was kind of mushy and sticky.
Just like with every skill, you can learn it from YouTube videos, so that’s where we turned. There are many videos about tempering chocolate, and some offer contradictory advice. So we decided to stick with the advice from this video and just try it out. And lo and behold, it’s so much easier with this method than I had thought! (This is a recurring theme: something that seems intimidating at first turns out to be pretty easy once you dive into it and try it out.)
So we were able to make really nice chocolate bonbons, with that delicious crunch! I don’t think I’ll ever go back.
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.