Chocolate, but make it special
My favourite story about chocolate comes from primary school, when a classmate gave all of her friends homemade Belgian chocolate bars decorated with Haribo teddy bears, almonds, coconuts on Valentine's Day... very simple, but from heart!
What's so special, simply melt chocolate and put candies on top, right? I've tried several times - many of them the chocolate came out to be inedible or melted quickly in hands. When science gets involved in my hobbies, I get too excited, so I did my research in how to get the perfect chocolate at home!
One of the main ingredients of chocolate is cocoa butter, but cocoa butter is a polymorphic substance, which means that it can form several forms of crystals after a change of temperature (melting, cooling). What does that mean? Chocolate can produce in total 6 different forms of cocoa butter crystals, each with its own characteristics. The first 4 forms will have a low melting point (will melt in your hands), soft, with grainy lumps, poorly breaking, white spots will form. 6-shaped crystals will form a very hard chocolate, which will harden in several weeks. However, 5-shaped crystals forms the usual chocolate, which is shiny, breaks well, does not melt quickly in hands and does not form white spots. However, in order to obtain such chocolate by melting chocolate chips or a chocolate bar, it is necessary to temper the chocolate.
I recommend Alex aka "fench guy cooking" Youtube video about chocolate tempering. Alex also tried to melt the chocolate by the Sous-Vide method (they use device that can maintain low, accurate temperature for a long time), demonstrating the importance of checking the temperature whilst melting the chocolate.
Ingridients:
- chocolate (chocolate chips or bar, do not use baking chocolate)
- toppings by choice
- thermometer is a must!
Instructions:
I used Belconade 70% dark chocolate. On the side of the chocolaye bag there was also information about melting, cooling and working temperatures, depending on the type of the chocolate you're goint to use - dark, milk or white:
a photo of https://www.belcolade.com/
1.Pour a little water into the saucepan and boil until steam appears. Place a bowl on top (so that it is not soaked directly in water), pour in the chocolate chips (leave about a quarter for cooling) and constantly stirring melt until the chocolate reaches the melting (in my case 50°-55°C) temperature.
2.Then take off the bowl, continue stirring and put in the remaining chocolate chips broken into smaller pieces until the chocolate reaches cooling (27°-28°C) temperature.
3.Place the bowl back on a steam and constantly stirring heat the chocolate back to working (29°-30°) temperature.
4.Pour the meltef chocolate on a baking paper and even it out. Put on toppings by your choice. Place in the refrigerator until hardened. Break into pieces and enjoy!
Chocolate tempering might sound very stressful at first, but once you've tried you'll realize that the whole process is very simple and enjoyable!
