For a far more detailed tutorial on tempering chocolate, please have a look at our Chocolate #101: Tempering at Home post. Thank you!
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Pete finds these ironic. Whilst they have the shape of a regular chocolate frog, they’re really an adult version – 70% dark Belgian chocolate studded with cacao nibs (crushed cocoa beans). They’re super dark both in colour and taste, and I’m sure they’re good for you, given that 70% dark chocolate is supposed to be both low GI and high in anti-oxidants.
Several years ago, instructed by David Lebovitz’ The Great Book of Chocolate, I taught myself to temper chocolate. It’s a great skill to have up your sleeve and, once you’ve got your head around it, it’s actually quite easy to do.
It’s helpful to understand from the outset that all candy making works on similar principles. Whether you’re tempering chocolate, making fudge or creating nougat, the aim is dissolve the crystal structure and teach it to reform in a different way.
Tempering chocolate is about melting the chocolate into a liquid form, then teaching the crystals to reform in a manner that will allow it to set hard and glossy, rather than dull and brittle. From experience, there are two important elements in all candy making – temperature and patience. If you want to temper chocolate well, you need to invest in a good thermometer. Mine is digital and waterproof and I use it as frequently as my dishwasher, so it has well and truly justified its $70 purchase price.
Tempering Chocolate #101 – Dark Chocolate
Step 1: Pour some chocolate callets (50 – 70% cocoa) or finely chopped chocolate into a small pyrex bowl. The amount isn’t really important, although you want enough to make it worthwhile – I use a minimum of 400g.
Step 2: Melt the chocolate in short 30 second bursts in the microwave. You need to get the melted chocolate to a temperature of 115F to ensure that all the crystals are dissolved. Make sure it doesn’t get much hotter than that, or you’ll scorch the chocolate. (Now you can see why a good thermometer is critical.)
Step 3: Put a large chunk of tempered chocolate into the melted liquid. The theory here is that the tempered chocolate will “teach” the melted crystals to reform in a particular way. I keep large pieces of chocolate in the fridge specifically for this purpose. Keeping them cold speeds up the process, but you’ll still need to be patient.
Instead of one large lump, you could use pieces of chocolate – the important thing is that the chocolate should be hard and glossy (tempered) to start with.
Give the bowl a good stir and check the temperature. Allow the molten chocolate to drop to a temperature of between 88F – 90F. Go away, read a book or play solitaire on the computer, coming back occasionally to give it a stir.
Step 4: When the melted chocolate has reached 90F, start testing it by smearing a little onto a plate and putting it in the fridge. Once it’s tempered, it will set hard and glossy quite quickly (untempered chocolate will stay soft and sticky). Using a large fork, scoop the remains of the chunk out of the melted chocolate and wrap it in a sheet of parchment paper to reuse another day.
Step 5: In order to work with the chocolate, it needs to be kept at a temperature of 88F – 90F. If it falls below this it will be out of temper (cranky?) and won’t set properly. I use a heat mat covered with a folded tea towel, which holds the chocolate at the perfect temperature for enrobing.
Step 6: The tempered chocolate is now ready to use. You can stir inclusions into it, as I did (they’re cacao nibs you see in the photo below), dip truffles into it, pour it into moulds or pipe it onto a cake. One of the easiest things to make is nut bark, which involves stirring in a variety of nuts and then spreading the whole mix onto a large sheet of parchment. Once it has set hard, it can be broken into irregular shapes and stored in an airtight container.
Note: Milk and White Chocolate can be tempered in the same way, although the setting temperatures for these are slightly lower than for dark.
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
I should have known, a click and heat mat, genius.
I have been saying to the beautiful Jane that someone should invent a wheat bag in the shape of a bowl or be like a star fish and have a draw string to pull up the arms around the bowl. So people can easily melt chocolate. Particularly after disaster which was the 5 year old boy’s ‘helpful’ finishing touch of a splash of water in final chocolate truffle mix, the thought of a double boiler puts too much water too close to good chocolate.
Jane’s point of why not use the microwave as you need it to heat the wheat bag always stops my train of thought.
a-Ha the wheat bag could temper the chocolate which is already melted. A new use for an old idea. Sorry for the ramble.
Moo, these are the heat packs I use – http://www.shinbio.com.au/. They really are genius and, covered with a couple of layers of cloth, they keep the chocolate at 88 – 90F for a good 15 minutes. I reckon they’d work better than a wheat pack, and you can wash them, which is hard to do if you get chocolate on the wheat pack (could you imagine? All the wheat would sprout!).
But the heat pack can’t be used to temper the choc, all it can do is hold it at the right temperature for working with. I’m with Jane on that one – the microwave really is the best thing for melting, and then tempering is simply a case of letting it cool with some tempered choc in it, so that the crystals “learn” to form in the right way. Of course, Jane can probably do the spread-with-spatula-on-cold-marble tempering thing, but I’ve never been able to master that – I just end up with chocolate all over the kitchen! :)
I am, if nothing else, the laziest baker around–I learned a quick temper method from Rose Levy Beranbaum in her Cake Bible book–weigh out the chocolate you’re melting…chop. Put aside about 1/4 of the chocolate. Melt the bulk of the chocolate…Stir til smooth then stir in the remaining chopped choc. Stir till smooth and all is uniformly melted.
Your Ironic Freddos are really nice and shiny–I wonder how the quick temper method would stand up to those…(I rarely do something so refined. I hide flaws by making “rough” stuff.)
Babette, first of all, you are hardly what anyone would ever call lazy!
Secondly, I’ve tried that method of tempering, but find it doesn’t always work consistently for me – I think that’s because at the end of the day, the chocolate has to be at the right temperature when all the extra bits are melted in. That varies a lot depending on how hot the melted choc was in the first place. Having said that, it’s a great method when I only need a little bit of tempered chocolate, to pipe on a cake or dip cookies into.
Hi there
I have just discovered your blog, courtesy of David Lebovitz’s piece on caramelised white chocolate. (Which I will be giving a go posthaste!)
I see that you live in Sydney and that you use Callebaut callets. I live in Sydney too and I don’t recall seeing Callebaut callets anywhere. I buy Lindt in bulk from The Essential Ingredient, but I would love to be able to get the callets. I bought some at the Victoria Markets in Melbourne on the weekend, but they are not going to last until the next trip down south!
Can you tell me where you buy them?
Regards
Kim
Hi Kim,
Try Chef’s Warehouse in Surry Hills: 111-115 Albion St, Surry Hills New South Wales 2010, (02) 9211 4555 . You can buy dark, milk and white Callebaut callets there in 2.5kg bags or 10kg sacks (guess how I buy it? :)). If you just want little portions, you can buy them in (I think) 200g bags from Colefax Chocolates. Having said that, the callets are waaay cheaper at Chef’s Warehouse (works out at about $18/kg). My big tip with Chef’s Warehouse – take lots of money. The vanilla beans there are super-cheap if you buy them in bulk (500g for $75, which works out at about 70c/bean). The sign says “trade only”, but they will sell to retail buyers, you just don’t get the trade prices. Please don’t hold me responsible for the amount of money you spend.. :D
I am absolutely besotted with the Callebaut callets – I use them for everything. I used to buy Lindt as well from TEI, but it’s so much easier to use callets as compared to chopping up those 1kg blocks! Plus I think the Callebaut chocolate is much nicer.
Cheers, Celia
Thanks for that Celia. I hadn’t thought of looking there. I will check it out next week when I have a day off. $18.00 a kilo sounds considerably better than the $29.00 a kilo I paid for the 70% callets I bought in Melbourne! I suspect that I will be forking out for bulk vanilla beans as well!
Regards
Kim
No worries, Kim. They have these brilliant Callebaut baking sticks there as well. There’s a photo here.
Oh, and we use the vanilla beans to make our own vanilla extract – details here if you’re interested.
As I said, take lots of money! :)
Cheers, Celia
These look so good!
Hi there,
sorry for asking a dumb question, but in step 3 where does the lump of tempered chocolate come from? Is it simply a lump of chocolate that you have not melted in the microwave? I will have to try this tempering approach – I am sure it will make a big difference to the finished look/feel of chocolate things I make. I tend to add a big spodge of alcohol (to hide sins with hurried melting etc in the microwave) which seems to bring up a nice shine and ofcourse adds another layer of flavour.
Thanks for the tip re Chefs warehouse too…and the warning about other temptations lurking there!
Not at all, I should have been clearer. Yes, the big lump is a piece that hasn’t been melted in the microwave – I keep it in the fridge strictly for tempering chocolate. It’s so big that it doesn’t seem to get much smaller, so I’ve had that piece for ages!
It started life as a chunk off a big block of Callebaut chocolate. You can basically buy chocolate in two ways – as a block or as callets (there are others, but those are the main ones). I don’t buy the blocks anymore, simply because I find a 5kg block unwieldy, but I still have some chunks leftover from the last block I bought ages ago which I use just to temper the callets. If you don’t want to buy a big block, you might be able to find a place that sells the Callebaut broken up into chunks. Otherwise, you can buy Lindt in the 1kg blocks, or even just buy the small blocks of Lindt (from supermarkets) and use them. The thing is that the chocolate you use as your “seed” should be in temper (ie. shiny and glossy, not blooming and dull) when you put it into the melted chocolate.
It’s a pretty easy way of tempering once you get your head around it, but you do need a good thermometer. And if you want to keep the chocolate at temp so you can work it, the heat mats are invaluable – I haven’t found any other ways to keep the choc at a consistent temperature. Hope that answers your question! I’ll be putting up two more chocolate recipes in the next couple of weeks – one for truffles and one for almond rochers… :)
PS. Fair warning when it comes to spending money at Chef’s Warehouse, it is waaay to easy too spend a fortune in there. While you’re there, check out their cooking spirits – unbelievable prices!
Thanks for explaining that – most appreciated. I will definately give this method a try. And a visit to Chefs Warehouse is on my list….just need a reasonable excuse (or spare time) to head down there! I am going to try your vanilla extract recipe too – looks simple and probably tastes much better than the shop bought one. Thanks for all the recipes and stories, i am enjoying your site!
Thank you! I hope you have fun with the chocolate and vanilla.. :)
Thank you spice and more, I now understand tempering and where that large chunk of chocolate comes from!!!!! So….will give this a try. Soon. Thanks Celia!
Hi
i have been trying to temper chocolate – it works some days, it doesnt most days! i have been told to melt the chocolate to around 45 degrees, cool it to 27degrees (either by seeding or sitting chocolate in ice water) and then reheating it to 32degrees. i notice you dont bring it down to 27, you just bring it down to the 32 degree working temperature. is the chocolate still firm? is your way foolproof? i get the temperatures right, but still dont have any luck. very confused!
Hi Rosa
It is quite confusing, and there seems to be lots of different methods out there. I don’t bother bringing the chocolate down and then reheating it, and my chocolate is almost always firm and glossy. I say “almost” because some days I struggle with white and milk chocolate, particularly when it’s very hot in the kitchen, and it just won’t cool enough. Dark chocolate always works. I do think you need to seed the chocolate in some way, simply cooling it doesn’t seem to work consistently. That’s because the thinking is this: you heat the chocolate up to break down all the crystals, then you have to re-teach those crystals how to form. You do that by introducing already tempered chocolate, which then gives the melted crystals a template to form in, so to speak.
Also, it’s worth checking your thermometer is really accurate. I work in Fahrenheit, simply because that’s how I first learnt, and my thermometer reads both in F and C. So I take the chocolate to 115F (46C), then seed it and bring the temp down to 90F (32C) before I start testing (this is for dark, milk and white need to be a couple of degrees F lower). Testing is important too – smear a little on a plate or a bit of parchment and put it in the fridge for a couple of minutes.
The other important thing is keeping your chocolate at the right temperature. You need to find a way to keep it at temper, because if it cools too much, it falls out of temper, and won’t be glossy when you use it. So you can’t temper the choc and then just leave the bowl on the bench, because if you do, within a few minutes it will have cooled further and will no longer set well.
Oh, you also need to make sure you’re using couverture chocolate. These techniques won’t work with compound chocolate, which have had things added to it. (At least, I don’t think they will..)
Hope that helps, Celia
Hi Celia,
I’ve been looking for a good candy thermometer for a while now. Can you tell me which one you use and where you bought it?
Many thanks!
Anthony
Hi Anthony, I’m not sure of the brand as it isn’t on the thermometer, but I do know we bought it at Essential Ingredient years and years ago, while they were still at Camperdown! It cost a lot, but it’s waterproof, and it’s still working. I do think you can get much cheaper digital thermometers now – ours is a probe style one – I think I’ve seen some for under $20 at places like Chefs’ Warehouse.
Cheers, Celia
Thanks Celia. The Essential Ingredient is just around the corner from me in Rozelle. Will also make a trip to Chef’s Warehouse very soon!