If you are at least half-serious about chocolate making, you will enjoy even the tempering process. If you do not do tempering, you cannot have smooth and shiny chocolates, your chocolates will be gritty when you bite them and whitish-gray crystals and blotches will appear on the surface of your chocolates.

Expert chocolate makers do not consider this step as unnecessary because they know that it has to be done to give to chocolates the qualities of smoothness and shine, which are not their natural attributes. Conching makes the particles of chocolates near-close to being smooth but it is tempering that keeps the chocolate crystals from becoming “visible” to the tongue.

Cocoa butter, what makes chocolates “real”, is responsible for the rich and creamy texture of chocolates. It is cocoa liquor that gives you cocoa butter and the former is the product–in paste form–if you grind roasted cocoa beans. The beans contain more than 53% of cocoa butter in them. If tempering is not undertaken, the cocoa butter crumbles and you get white spots that appear on the chocolate’s surface. What you have will be most unattractive chocolates.

Cocoa butter has different types of fatty acids that also melt and solidify at varied temperatures due to which you have to closely monitor chocolate temperatures during tempering. This is what makes tempering very tricky. Melting of chocolates separates these crystals but tempering stabilize and bond them together securely, thus avoiding blooming, dull appearance and crumbly texture of your chocolates.

To do chocolate tempering, you can use three methods:

Tabliering or the chocolate artisan’s method is considered the most intricate. First, you melt the chocolate to 90F. One third of the melted chocolate is worked on a marble slab after which the remaining chocolate is mixed in slowly till the entire mass melts and the specific temperature is distributed evenly to the whole chunk.

The second process, “seeding”, is less demanding. Already-tempered chocolate is used for triggering the crystallization of free-moving crystals with the “seeds”. The process starts just similar to tabliering but the only difference is that you melt only two-thirds of the chocolate and the remaining one-third is cut into strips. These strips are mixed in to inoculate the melted chocolate; the end-goal being to distribute temperatures and textures evenly to the entire chocolate. Maintaining specific temperature is crucial in this process as well.

The easiest method is using a tempering machine and this does not involve any hassles like maintaining temperatures because this part is taken care of by a computer chip. You will be aware of having all the time in the world to focus on developing your skills in chocolate making.