I was with a friend recently who has attended both of my chocolate classes, has my raw chocolate eBook and is now an aspiring professional chocolate maker.
We were having fun, experimenting with some new flavours, textures and aromas, as you do. The chocolate was tempered, had all the extra flavours and textures added and just needed to be cast into moulds.
The chocolate was looking pretty thick to me and, had it been me, I’d have given it a little heat just to loosen it up.
She decided she could get the chocolate safely into the mould before it set… she was wrong. It was going into the mould in chunks, that’s how thick it was.
I would have given her a (lovingly) hard time about it, but she knew she was being impatient and that she’d pay for it.
She decided to pop the whole mould into the dehydrator for a few minutes, just to soften it slightly, but she was multi tasking and forgot it (left it for 5 minutes, that’s how fast chocolate comes out of temper!), it heated up beyond 33c, came out of temper and that was that.
We set the chocolate in the mould anyway and the next day came to find some really unpleasant looking stuff happening; chocolate bloom, sticking to the mould and dull. These are classic signs of untempered chocolate at its ‘best’.
The solution? Pop it in the freezer for 10 minutes (this causes the cacao crystals to contract and allows untempered chocolate to release from the mould), chop it up, heat it to 42c and re-temper it.
Chocolate can be re-tempered time and time again and only gets better.
So, what’s the lesson here?
- Allow at least 1 hour for a chocolate making session, even for just a small batch of chocolate, because something is bound to come up, take your attention away, etc.. Better to have more time than not enough time.
- Give the chocolate your full attention; as you gain more experience, you can loosen up a little, but not just yet.
- Avoid taking short cuts; they will likely end ‘badly’ and cause you to spend more time fixing the chocolate than doing it correctly in the first place.
