Baisc recipe:
1 part cocoa powder
1 part cocoa butter
powdered sugar and flavourings to taste
some already tempered chocolate
4:4:3 tbsp is what I normally use.
All temperature ranges are absolute maximums. If you go over, you can easily ruin everything.
If you want to try your hand at tempering (without a microwave because you’re an idiot like me), you need to very slowly heat everything to 115-120F. All the fat cyrstals in the cocoa butter will be fully melted at this point. You can remove from heat, slowly add shredded chocolate as “seed crystals” and constantly stir – this will form “beta crystals” and those are the ones that give chocolate all those wonderful properties – nice snap when you break it, doesn’t quickly melt in your hands, is more dense, and darn it just tastes better. You can do all this with just the base ingredients by keeping the temperature at 90F, and slowly lowering to 80-82F. You can check for proper tempering by pressing one side of parchment paper into the chocolate, letting that cool on the counter (3-5 minutes and your kitchen needs to be 72F or cooler otherwise) and testing for colour, snap, fingerprints, and might as well taste it. Once you’re convinced it’s tempered, remove from heat, and keep slowly stirring the chocolate until it cools to below 79F.
If you don’t have any tempered chocolate on hand for seeding, you can pour the initial chocolate mix onto a cold slab of marble, use a bench scraper to smooth, fold, and stir until the mixture reaches 80F. Return that to a double boiler at 90F, test, and repeat if needed.
There are other ways to temper without a giant chilled marble slab (which nobody should run out to buy), like:
- using the friction from a food processor and some hot air from a hair dryer to slowly bring up to temperature, and let cool down. Pure insanity.
- sous vide a baggie of the chocolate mixture and heat to 115F. Cool to 81F, and then bring back to 90F if you want to use this chocolate for dipping.
- Break my cardinal rule and go use a microwave. It’s by far the easiest, but my NDA prohibits me from discussing it.