I’ve been fighting with tempering bean-to-bar milk chocolate. All the documentation that I can find online talks about using pre-tempered chocolate as a starting point. This seems to be an easier way to do it as you’re re-tempering the chocolate. There’s already a vast quantity of Type V crystals in there that, I have a feeling, help seed the rest of the process. In my case, I’m assuming I’m starting with zero.
While reading though the Chocolate Alchemy site I came across a review of a machien called EZTemper. In the review he has a line that he never comes back to that says And you can actually load it with chocolate if you wish. This made me wonder, can I do the same with the whole melted mass?
So I tried it. This was the procedure:
- Warm up a sous vide setup to 45C
- Melt chocolate for 1 hour
- Add ice to water bath to drop temperature to ~26-27C as quickly as possible
- Massage bag with chocolate until chocolate temperature drops to ~26.5C.
- Take the bag out of the bath and use an IR themometer to meassure chocolate temperature
- Raise sous vide temp to 33.6C and let chocolate sit for 24 hours
As you can see from the image this methods seems to work. The two chocolates on the bottom was made from the previous procedure, the one ontop was the outcome of my 3rd atempt at tempering. And yes, I scratched the surface of the chocolate trying to line them up for the picture, oops.
This looks promising for home chocolatiers that have the time to let the product sit before tempering.