Addison Stoddard: "Welcome back to another USU Extension Education highlight. My name is Addison Stoddard, and joining me today is Andrea Leduc, production manager for Aggie Chocolate Factory. Thanks so much for being here with me."
Andrea Leduc: "Yeah, I'm so excited for today."
Addison: "The holidays are here, and that means it's time for chocolate and sweet treats. So Andrea, how do you know what chocolate is right for you and what you're making?"
Andrea: "Great, great question. So it comes down to taste honestly, and a little bit your skill set. So, I fully recommend that everybody go out and buy a bunch of different chocolate and taste it to see which one it has your favorite flavor profile. Each chocolate because of the fermentation process, the manufacturing process, and year to year is actually going to taste a little different. So you need to find what tastes best to you."
"There are also different types of chocolates. So you got your bitter sweet and your semi sweet chocolates, which are going to be more obviously bitter and less sweet. You have swiss style and sweet milk chocolate that are going to have more milk, more creaminess, and also different melting points than your darker chocolates. Then there's white chocolate, which is a whole controversy on itself, but I consider white chocolate to be one of my favorites. And then we also have something called compound chocolate. The difference is that compound chocolate does not require tempering, which is a crystallization of the fat crystals in the chocolate, but it can it also doesn't have cocoa butter. So it has a bit of a different flavor, and some people can interpret it as waxy, but it is a lot easier to work with. Back to dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate, they all have different temperatures where they need to be crystallized, and that process is called tempering."
Addison: "Yeah, we're going to jump in and talk a little bit more about tempering because it is an important part of making chocolates. Could you tell me a little bit about what it is and how you do it?"
Andrea: "Tempering is—I would refer to it as magic. It might as well be magic because the process although it is scientific and relates to temperature, it can decide to work or not to work. Even as a professional, sometimes I have days where the chocolate doesn't want to temper and days where it will temper super easily.
What happens is you need to melt the fat crystals that are in the cocoa butter in the chocolate, and that happens at around 40 degrees celsius for just about every chocolate. The lighter the chocolate is, the closer to 40 you want to stay. You have more wiggle room in dark chocolate or semi sweet or bitter sweet chocolate than you do with the lighter chocolates. So you can melt it up to 40 degrees celsius, and then we need to cool it down in a controlled way with also agitation. It needs to be mixed around. So we have machines that do that for us at the Aggie Chocolate Factory, but at home, it's just stirring, or you can dump it out on a marble slab and mix it back and forth. It just—chocolate needs to be agitated so you can knock those crystals into formation, just like you would Lego blocks. As the chocolate cools, it crystallizes in different forms. So when we hit where the beta five crystals form, which is around 31 to 29 degrees celsius, then the crystals can start to form.
One of the coolest magic tricks about chocolate is when it's in that temperature zone and it has been tempered correctly, you can take a bit of that chocolate and swipe it on the table and within a minute it should start to go matte instead of shiny. So when chocolate is liquid, it's really shiny. When it's tempered in just air, it will go matte and have a satiny smooth finish instead of the shine, and that should happen within a minute of doing that swipe on the countertop if you have tempered your chocolate correctly. "
Addison: "Thank you so much for joining me today,"
Andrea: "You are welcome"
