You are sure to succumb to the temptation of a creamy, shiny, smooth, crisp and tasty chocolate; but are you aware that these qualities are acquired only by a process called tempering? This process consists of three stages: heating, cooling and reheating. Your chocolate gets tempered once it is melted and worked upon.
Other collateral benefits you can derive out of tempering are: your chocolates will have a prolonged shelf life and will not be affected by the undesirable blooming. Blooming gives a crumbly and dull appearance to your chocolates, bring an undesirable taste to them, and enable appearance of whitish gray spots on the surface of chocolates. Just for the sake of preventing blooming, you should temper your chocolates.
The ingredient of chocolate is cocoa beans and there are specific temperatures at which these fatty acids melt and solidify. This strange behavior can be mended by tempering, which makes these fatty acids crystallize homogeneously.
Again these fatty acids keep you alert because you must maintain specific temperatures during tempering due to their peculiar behavior. They re-crystallize into six types of crystals that dominate during six unique temperatures. Just to counter this phenomenon, your alertness is required so that there is no deviation in the specific temperatures you should be watching. Even a small slip may lead to repeating the whole tempering process again.
Your aim is to temper the chocolates so as to impart shine, smoothness and crispness to them and you are helped in this process only by one crystal out of the six, i.e. type V crystals. These crystals alone are capable of giving chocolates these desirable qualities.
Tempering by hand can be carried out in two ways. The first is melting the chocolate to the specific temperature and working upon it till it is successfully tempered. The next method is to seek the help of a seed to temper your melted chocolate. Here the seed is an already tempered chocolate. You should maintain specific temperatures not only during these two processes but even when you subject your tempered chocolate to the dipping and molding.
Bulk-making of chocolates should be done only by using a tempering machine as it makes a few things easier for you. You need not monitor temperatures since a programmed computer chip does it, moisture is no more a hassle, you can produce more type V crystals that make chocolates more shiny and smooth and the best of all, heating, cooling and reheating are automated processes.
A tempering machine eases all your tension and more time is available to you to plan and carry out your ideas for expanding your business.