TEMPERING AND ENROBING


From tempering to enrobing: making good choices


Suzanne Callander finds out why chocolate tempering is so important as a precursor to enrobing and looks in more depth at the enrobing process itself.


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hocolate tempering is central to the creation of fine chocolate and is considered by many chocolatiers as being both an art and a science. “It’s about making the chocolate look pretty and shiny and it’s about getting the process right too


– bringing the chocolate to the right temperature before it can be used for moulding or enrobing,” says Dean Bingham, co-founder of US-based Dean’s Sweets. The tempering process forces the crystals in chocolate


to align and it is this that creates a crisp chocolate finish that is uniform in colour and has a satisfying snap and good mouth feel. According to Dean, poorly-tempered chocolate will have a streaky, cloudy appearance and will not have the same desirable snap as well tempered chocolate.


The traditional way to temper chocolate is by using a


marble or granite countertop or slab, with melted chocolate being spread across the slab and swept back and forth with hand-held metal scrapers. The cooling and the stirring brings the chocolate to the correct temperature, briefly, so that the crystals align. Most chocolate producers today will instead use a tempering machine which, in simple terms, is a rotating kettle with a heater which melts the chocolate and keeps it moving, with a fixed baffle being used to separate the tempered chocolate from the untempered chocolate. Dean’s Sweets undertakes the tempering process every


day – to create chocolate to enrobe its range of truffles, caramels, and buttercreams and to create seasonal moulded items. “We melt the chocolate overnight, and in the morning


34 Kennedy’s Confection October 2023


KennedysConfection.com


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