Tempering And Bloomed Chocolate

Tempering

One of our biggest challenges as small-batch chocolate makers is tempering. If you’re a chef, baker or a chocolate lover, you may have heard of this term. For those who haven’t, tempering is the process of heating and cooling of chocolate to make it that shiny, snappy, smooth bar that you’re most familiar with.

Chocolate, at a microscopic level, is made up of temperature-sensitive crystals, and only one type of crystal (Type V) is ideal for shelf stability and smoothness. Tempering is all about harnessing and keeping those Type V crystals!

All the chocolate that we currently produce is hand-tempered, and not tempered by machines.

Chocolate Bloom

Chocolate crystals, as mentioned before, are very sensitive to temperature. When chocolate is exposed to different temperatures, your chocolate forms other crystals that thrive in specific temperatures. At times, they start to form white patterns, or dusty white surface bloom. This happens when chocolate is stored at drastically different temperatures during storage.

So is it safe to eat?

Yes! Bloomed chocolate is still safe to eat. Tempering just creates an ideal vehicle for us to taste that chocolate flavor. Although bloomed/untempered may develop a chalky texture and an unpleasant look, bloomed chocolate is still chocolate. You can even melt it down, and mold it up again and the bloom will no longer be there!