Tempering

Abstract

This chapter discusses the important effects of tempering the liquid chocolate masse. When considering the strong impact of tempering on the very important quality characteristics, there is an obvious need to quantitatively understand the effect of the tempering process on: the fat crystal structure, the chocolate itself and the relationship between the two. The temper-related properties are determined by the fat micro-structure, which can be tailored by the tempering process. Work on conventional chocolate tempering with improved analytical instrumentation, such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), has demonstrated that there can be less than 1% of fat in crystallised form after “good” tempering. New tempering processes produce very finely dispersed cocoa butter seed crystals contained in a cocoa butter melt. Such suspensions contain about 10-20% of solid fat and, if 0.2-1.0% of this is added to untempered chocolate, it still guarantees a good temper and gives excellent product characteristics.