Chocolate handling
Featuring differing levels of cocoa solids, cocoa butter, and sugar, each variety of chocolate behaves differently during manufacturing.
Dark chocolate contains at least 60 percent cocoa, making it bitter and less smooth in texture than milk chocolate, which contains between 30 and 60 percent cocoa and has more sugar and dairy. White chocolate has no cocoa solids, but it has at least 20 percent cocoa butter, sugar and dairy, making it sweeter and easy to melt.
Chocolate must be melted to coat and dip products and to deposit into moulds for tablet bars, truffles, and other individual pieces. But before it reaches these stages, chocolate must be tempered.
Mike Nevines, technical director, PTL Machinery, Auckland, New Zealand, says tempering involves passing molten chocolate through a series of temperatures while agitating it to create many small, stable “beta” cocoa butter crystals.
In educational materials on tempering, PTL says exact temperatures vary among chocolate types, depending on the hardness of the cocoa liquor and cocoa butter, the type of processing, the total fat content, and the ratios of any other fats added to the chocolate recipe.