Heating Compound Chocolate

Compound chocolate is one of the easiest chocolates to melt down. I'm Rachel Tel. And in this lesson, we're gonna melt compound chocolate and talk a little bit about the tempering process. For real chocolate. There are some very important uh pieces of equipment when it comes to working with chocolate. Now, if you're going to work with chocolate a lot, I would highly encourage you to invest in a melting pot. Now, there are a few different melts pots out on the market. Uh One of which is uh specifically made for candy melts. Uh This is a heater that uh warms up to a temperature that tends to work really well for compound chocolate. The downside to this one, while it's an inexpensive choice, you can't actually control the temperature. Um It is either high or low and there's no in between. And occasionally this can just get too hot and seize your chocolate making it very thick and challenging to work with. If you're just gonna do a little bit of chocolate work. This is an option because it's inexpensive, but you can also just heat your chocolate in a bowl over a pot of water known as a double boiler. Um That is most certainly an easy option. Everybody has a bowl at home and a pot fill it with a, just a little bit of water, put your bowl on top and heat the water to a simmer and slowly melt your chocolate. But one of the important pieces with that is paying attention to temperature. Uh And again, it really depends on which product you're using, the manufacturer of that product and uh look up and see what temperature is its melting point and what was gonna work best for that chocolate. Another option is heating it in the microwave. Now, you wanna use a heat, microwave proof bowl. Uh I tend to recommend utilizing glass for melting chocolate. It retains its heat. Well, um it doesn't uh tend to, you know, go uh so hot that you can't handle it. Um And it, it just works really well for the purposes of chocolate. You can absolutely use a silicon bowl, which is even nicer because you can leave that chocolate right in your silicone bowl. And then as it comes back to room temperature and solidifies, they're very easy to pop out any excess chocolate. So I actually really enjoy using silicone in the microwave. It's an easy option. Um This actually doesn't heat up too warm. So you have a better chance of keeping your chocolate at the right temperature to work with uh for a longer period of time if it's in a pot. Now, the downside to silicone is silicone itself actually cools fairly quickly, much quicker than glass does. So you may find yourself going in and out of the microwave a little bit more if you're using a silicone bowl, um, if you don't have the heater itself, so lots of options in the way of heating. Uh bottom line, choose the method that is gonna work best for you. Now, this uh this is more of a commercial grade heater and because I work with chocolate a lot, it is worth just a little bit more money for me to be able to invest in because it has a temperature dial. I am able to dial that in exactly to the temperature I need, depending upon which style of chocolate I'm using. It's very easy to use. You literally just put your tips right inside, you put the lid back on and you set it to the temperature desired for whichever chocolate you're using. Now, this particular machine isn't going to get too hot if you've set it to the right temperature for your chocolate. And that's what I love about this particular machine is that you can heat up your chocolate, you literally put your chocolate in and you can walk away for a little while and never worry about your chocolate burning or seizing and there's a difference between burning and season. So let me talk about that a little bit if you have heated your chocolate to the right temperature. It's going to be nice and fluid. It will flow evenly. It will have this beautiful stream as you pull up your chocolate from the bowl. Now, if you happen to heat it a little too high, just slightly too high, the chocolate actually becomes thick and we call that season. It just means that it doesn't have that same ribbon flow that it would normally have that is fixable. So if you ever have heated your chocolate just a little too high, all you need to do is add in some additional chocolate uh that's called seeding. And what that does is it brings all of that chocolate back to the same consistency that it's supposed to be because it lowers its temperature. It distributes the fat within the chocolate nicely and it allows that ribbon flow of chocolate to happen. Again, that's especially important if you're using real chocolate. Uh That seeing method is actually a way to be able to temper your chocolate. So tempering your chocolate simply means we're going to bring that chocolate to one temperature. We're gonna lower it down a little bit either by just pulling it out of its heat source or by adding in additional chocolate. And that seeding process brings the temperature of that chocolate back down and allows all of the chocolate, the fat, the coco, the oils, everything to create an emulsion basically comes back together really nicely. And that drop in temperature, uh just helps solidify things back and then you're actually going to raise it to one more temperature. And all of these temperatures vary. So I can't give you just a set number, but they all vary depending upon the cocoa content and the um oil content that cocoa butter that's in there. Um It is one of those processes that just takes a little time, but once you get your chocolate into temper and you keep it at that temperature for, for that particular product, it stays in that nice flowing, perfect product condition for as long as it is heated. So you could literally put it in a pot and let it heat all day long, dipping in and out of it as many times as you need to. And at the end of the day, you turn your melting pot off and your chocolate res solidifies. So there are definitely advantages to investing into a melting pot. It's entirely up to you and really depends a lot on how much you plan to use chocolate within your decorating. Um or just in general, you know what you you plan to bake with. So let's just take a quick peek inside and see if this is starting to melt down. I mean, it definitely takes time. You can see that the uh chocolate compound on the bottom has most certainly started to melt, but it does take a little bit of time to do this. Uh just be patient. You come in and stir this every few minutes just to kind of move that chocolate around and make sure that it's all getting coated nicely. But your goal is to get a nice flowing chocolate. So we're going to let that warm just a little bit longer and I'll show you what it looks like when it's the proper temperature. All right, our chocolate has had enough time to really melt down just perfectly. What you are looking for is just a nice, smooth consistency. You don't want any lumps or chunks. You wanna make sure all of the chocolate, whether it's compound or regular is fully melted within your pan or your bowl. And then this is that perfect ribbon streaming that we're looking for. This is what's gonna allow our chocolate to slide into different molds or coat a balloon for bowls, um, or even just uh, drizzling over a parchment piece of paper for a wrap, for instance. So there are lots of uses for our chocolate. I would encourage you to melt some down, explore and play with this medium. And as always be creative.