You will definitely blush if you gift your untempered chocolates to your visitors because they will not be smooth and shiny; they will be coarse when bitten, and there will be whitish-gray blotches on top.

Master chocolatiers never miss this procedure because chocolates do not have smoothness and shine on their own and these have to be imparted to them by tempering. Of course, conching does make chocolate particles finer but without tempering, you cannot expect to make your chocolates enjoyable because visible crystals appear when you don’t temper.

For making chocolates, you use cocoa butter as the basic ingredient and it’s a derivative of chocolate liquor, which in turn, is extracted by grinding roasted cocoa beans. These roasted cocoa beans contain more than 53% of cocoa butter in them and the fine and creamy texture of the chocolates is due to the cocoa butter. When cocoa butter breaks up, white spots are formed if tempering is not done and these will dot the surface of the chocolates spoiling your chocolates’ attractiveness.

The fatty acids that are in cocoa butter crystallize in different temperatures hence you need to monitor and maintain temperatures during tempering. This is what makes the process problematical. Melting of chocolates makes these crystals separate but tempering makes these crystals stable and cling together, resulting in pristine surfaces, lustrous appearance and rich textures in chocolates.

You can do chocolate tempering using three methods. The first method involves tabliering; only ace chocolate artisans prefer this method. The chocolate is melted at a temperature of 90F and then one-third of this melted chocolate is worked on a marble top (or any heat-absorbing surface). The remaining chocolate is stirred in until the whole, thickened mass achieves a uniform texture and temperature.

The less complex method is “seeding” in which already-tempered chocolate is used as a seed to trigger the bonding of free-moving crystals. The initial step is similar to tabliering: two-thirds of the chocolate is melted and one-third is cut into small strips to be used as “seeds”. These seeds and the melted chocolate are stirred or worked so the specific uniform temperature is imparted to the whole mass. As in tabliering, you need to maintain specific temperatures in seeding as well.

If you want to make things trouble-free for you and just concentrate on developing your skills in this craft of chocolate making, you can always use a tempering machinewhich is the third way of tempering chocolates. This will save you a lot of time and effort laboring over your chocolates appeal.