A chocolate, that is crisp, tasty, exotically creamy, shiny and smooth, is an ultimate delight. Tempering is the process that imparts these fascinating qualities into the chocolate; it’s a three-stage process: heating, cooling and reheating. You temper the chocolate by working upon it after melting it.

If you want to increase the shelf life of the chocolate, you must temper. Likewise, if you want to stop whitish gray spots appearing on the chocolate leading to its dull and crumbly appearance and chalk-like taste (which is called blooming, by the way), you have to temper the chocolate.

Cocoa beans, from which chocolates are made, are full of fatty acids that melt and solidify at their unique temperatures but to induce them to crystallize uniformly, tempering is the only resort.

These fatty acids are the culprits in making the tempering process tedious. They re-crystallize into six types of crystals and these six types of crystals exhibit a dominant behavior at six different temperatures and this peculiarity compels you to maintain definite temperatures during tempering. If you fail to maintain these chocolate temperatures correctly, you run into trouble because there is the risk of having to repeat the process of tempering once again looming large on you. But the real purpose is to promote the creation of more of type V crystals that impart crispness, shine and smoothness to chocolates.

You can do tempering by hand in two ways. One is to melt the chocolate at the specific temperature and working upon it on a marble slab or any heat-absorbing surface. The other method is to use a “seed” in the form of an already-tempered chocolate to temper the freshly melted chocolate again at the specific temperature. You should continue to maintain specific temperatures during the subsequent processes of dipping and molding as well.

Production of large volumes of chocolates does need using a tempering machine. A chocolate tempering machine benefits you in many ways. You need not maintain or monitor specific temperatures; you can produce more of type V crystals that can dramatically give the shine and smoothness to your chocolates; heating, cooling and reheating are automatically done; and above all, excess moisture is not a point of concern.

By using a tempering machine, the commodity called “time” is available to you in abundance and you can utilize it to find out ways to expand your business.