[Music] tempering tempering my least favorite part of this entire process today is one of those rough days where it's raining outside we're not exactly sure why this is happening the relative humidity is really low but bars are coming out bad they look like this which tells us from the color that it might be too hot the relative humidity in the room is around 35% which is really low but the temperature is very high so tempering is kind of a mystery it's really annoying it's the biggest challenge that we have in our chocolate making process after running a business that's probably the hardest part is running a business to keep that going successfully and make sure everyone's happy and wheels are turning but tempering is the hardest of the chocolate making processes and that could potentially be because we're in Hawaii it's tropical great for growing not as good for chocolate making on the tempering side of things and so what's happening here is cocoa butter needs to get crystallized into a certain formation using temperature steel goes through this and glass goes through this and chocolate goes through this but all we're working with is cocoa butter and cocoa butter is made of three acids it's made of stearic Alaric and palmitic acid there's different ratios of these three that will affect the tempering I haven't found too many people who know much about this and so everybody I ask I haven't gotten a super good answer and I want to know more so if you know more about this let me know send me a paper but we're always trying to figure out and learn more and this is the really geeky side of things but when you understand it you can do a better job at tempering or just making chocolate in general so let's go into certain analogies of why this works if you were to take a glass of water and you put sand at the bottom and you were to stir it all up really fast and then freeze instantly all that sand and all the water would be pretty uniform and structured that's what's happening when we temper chocolate this is why it's strong why your chocolate bars got that nice snap why it's got a good shot on the top instead of this that's all just the oil separating crystal structure breaking let's use another analogy let's let's pretend there's let's not pretend at first there's six crystals that make up cocoa butter we want crystal number five but I want you to think of these six crystals as Lego blocks and so when we heat the chocolate up and we cool it off and then we warm it up a little bit all these Lego blocks that were scattered all over the place they start getting really close tight or tight or closer closer at the point where they lock together but they've also become the same Lego block the same crystal structure that's why your chocolate bars got that really nice snap that's why it doesn't have this going on now there's lots of reasons this may go on and one of them is relative humidity if it's too high the cocoa butter oil does not like water and so if they there's too much water in the air you're gonna have weird things going on like this the second thing would be latent heat we've had lots of problems with this that's when maybe too much heat gets stuck in the chocolate and it can't get released so in our case we load refrigerators we have bakery carts that we put in these double door refrigerators we slide in the racking and if we put the bars right on top of each other on these bakery carts instead of leaving a gap the heat doesn't escape properly and you end up with every bar looking like this on the back and sometimes the top is perfect so it's something about the heat getting trapped and not being released so that is latent heat issues and has to do with air flow if you get good air flow on it that should help a lot so we drilled holes in the side of our refrigerators to let the air flow through the panel's better and that helped us a lot because originally we had no idea what was going on and we asked a lot of questions of some of the right people and we eventually figured some of this out another thing is over crystallization so we used to use a batch temper we have a 200 kilo savage batch tempering machine and we thought that that would work perfectly for doing you temper the whole 200 kilos in one batch at one time and then you try and mold the entire batch the problem is that we don't add soya lecithin and we don't have enough cocoa butter in our chocolate to make this really work for us we haven't figured it out at least and so we must have remelted 50,000 chocolate bars one year when we first were trying this and it was very frustrating and so we sucked it up we ended up going to a continuous tempering machine which has a hot bowl it gets sucked internally goes up through an auger cooled off to the right temperature and then dispenses a little bit warm to the depositing head before starting that structure again so it's structural izing the crystals and breaking them and putting it back together and breaking them repeatedly and that allows you to keep molding way longer in the right formation where it doesn't over crystallize which we couldn't see happening in the big batch it just all of a sudden every bar started looking like this and this and so that was a huge bummer for us back in the day it made us very sad now we don't have this problem as often because of the continuous tempering machine these are things like in our case we use a jammie model Pro bake in the United States is what sells them our version is a diva right now it does 25 kilos at a time and we deposit from the batch temper into the diva we are getting a scaled up version so that we can do more at a time in one batch and keep milk and dark separated so we want to clean out the machines that's kind of a different topic let's go back to tempering Selmy does some fbm dozen these are batch tempering machines it's better for craft chocolate if you add soy lecithin it probably would make your life way easier we haven't experimented a lot with it but from everything I've learned soy lecithin what prevent a lot of these problems since most craft chocolate makers don't add it I wouldn't even try and mess with batch tempering maybe you could talk to dick tailor those guys seem to have figured it out really well but that is a over crystallization let's talk a bit about color color tells us a lot it tells us if it's maybe too hot or too cold and so this reddish color we're seeing here is indicating that out of our past experience that our numbers that its dispensing out of it's too hot so if we're using say 31 degrees Celsius that may be too hot we need to lower to thirty point five or even thirty every machine is a little bit different your room is gonna be different everything affects it and variables will change everything so it's not like one number is going to work the number I'm telling you now may not work for your facility but it will work for ours maybe depends on the day if it's raining it everything changes so this is a lot more of a cross your fingers and try and understand the science but there's some art to it you got to watch the way the chocolate behaves let's talk about the numbers really quickly in Fahrenheit it's about a hundred and fifteen degrees to 120 would melt all your crystals pretty quick as it gets sucked internally into the machine or maybe on a marble slab as you're moving it around you want to get it down to about 84 degrees Fahrenheit if your chocolate allows it you'll see when your hand tempering that you may not be able to go that far down before it starts to clump up you don't want to hit that clumping phase because it's almost too late to go back and then you were gonna want it warm it up a little bit so what the machine does is the Bowls hot it gets sucked internally goes through an auger and cooled and it dispenses through the head a little bit warmed when it does that usually its dispensing around 89 degrees Fahrenheit and that is going to go into each cavity the mold you're gonna be fine most of the time now in celcius those numbers are around you know we heat our bowl up to 50 before we start or 55 even that's like a fresh start there's no crystals as you drop it down I think inside the machine it's going to like 28 maybe 29 and then it's dispensed around 30 30.5 those are the numbers that work in our machine in our factory everybody's gonna have to tweak that a little bit but that's tempering for yeah today was a good day to do this because we're struggling with it as you control your environment more and more that does get better we have less problems now than we used to because we have just monitors so I have a little sensor that I can look on my phone and I can see what the relative humidity is in the room at that time I can see what the temperature is at that time and one of the reasons maybe the room is too hot so it's in the low 80s and that is really warm but the continuous tempering machine helps us with that it goes straight into the fridge and it comes out so we're still learning we're still trying to figure it out I guess it keeps it interesting so those are some of the reasons your chocolate may be out of temper and it's just a learning experience keep trying keep tweaking you'll get it persistence persistence and ignorance is worth a lot [Music]