TEMPERING
Could tempering machines become a thing of the past?
Kennedy’s Confection caught up with a team of researchers who are looking for the key to smooth chocolate and have found a way to create perfect chocolate which also simplifies the traditional tempering process.
e all know that creating chocolate which is glossy and snaps perfectly when broken is not a simple task. It requires tempering to slowly heat and cool melted chocolate repeatedly to coax the fatty acid crystals in the cocoa butter into a stable form to ensure the resulting chocolate has a good structure gloss and melting behaviour so it melts in the mouth and not in the hand. Typically, chocolate makers will employ ‘seeding’ during the tempering process to encourage the chocolate to crystallise. Often the seed is chunks or grated bits of already-tempered chocolate that act like magnets to attract loose crystals of fatty acids into line.
W
A good chocolatier can do this by eye. Their experience will tell them when the chocolate is ready, and they can make adjustments when it’s not. But achieving the same results in large-scale chocolate manufacturing operations has never been a straightforward or easy task. However, a research team from the Department of Food Science at the University of Guelph in Canada believes they have found a solution to create the perfect chocolate that could greatly simplify the traditional tempering process. Of course, there is a wide variety of tempering equipment available to help create the ideal structure in each batch of chocolate, but even these systems are not fool proof, and there can be large variabilities between different batches of cocoa butter. In a world first, the team led by food scientist, Dr. Alejandro Marangoni, has found that adding a key component in cocoa butter fat to melted chocolate helps to hold it together and give
26 Kennedy’s Confection November 2022
“By potentially eliminating the need for complex tempering machines our findings could
revolutionise the industry and allow smaller manufacturers
to produce chocolate without a big capital investment on machinery.”
it an ideal structure, simply and inexpensively. The team believes that their discovery, which appeared in the journal Nature Communications (1) last year could revolutionise how chocolate is made.
Despite there being a great deal of existing research into the effect of triacylglycerol composition on cocoa butter crystallisation behaviour, very little work has been carried out to date on the effects of the minor components of cocoa butter on this crystallisation behaviour and structure – minor components refer to non-triacylglycerol lipid molecules that are present in cocoa butter at very low levels.
KennedysConfection.com
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