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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 9:07 PM

    So the penultimate step is called "conching." The chocolate mixture is put in a machine that fundamentally reproduces the action of a mortar and pestle, and continuously ground for hours or, in some of the finest high-end chocolates, days.

    Industrial conchers (or "melangeurs") are typically the size of a small bus, but for home use it's possible to buy a machine originally designed for making dosa batter that works as a concher. A bowl with a stone base has a central spindle with stone rollers. The bowl turns, the rollers roll IN a pool of chocolate, continuously crushing the chocolate in front of them until the entire mixture reaches the texture you want.

    During this process, the whole thing outgasses. It gives up moisture, especially at the beginning, and also there are various smells that come off that really aren't lovely. (Remember, fermented food. Some notes are, I'm sorry, reminiscent of urine.) These are nice things NOT to have in the finished chocolate.

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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 9:13 PM

    Once you're happy that what you have is good melted chocolate, the final step is tempering.

    Chocolate is a suspension of finely ground flavorful things in cocoa butter. And cocoa butter is, chemically, a complex mixture of different fats. It can take on various crystal structures, depending on things like the exact cooling profile, agitation, the presence of seed crystals, etc. And these structures can have very different properties in terms of mouthfeel, stability, melting temperature, etc.

    If you just let melted chocolate set back up again, it won't be nice. The default crystal structure that the cocoa butter adopts will get soft and sticky at even moderately warm room temperature, and has a gummy feeling when chewed. It will also develop grey, powdery bloom very quickly, and turn chalky over time.

    So instead, you cool it *past* its normal freezing point, but with continuous agitation. At another, lower freezing point, it starts to form better crystals.

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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 9:17 PM

    By hand, this means spreading it out and scraping it up, over and over, on a polished stone slab while it cools. As the desirable crystals form, it takes on a dull, claylike consistency for which the professional term is "mush." Of course there are computer-controlled machines to do this at scale.

    The mush can be added back to a larger pool of melted chocolate, and as long as it's not hot enough to melt the seed crystals, this produces a pool of "tempered" chocolate that can be poured into bar molds or decorative molds, or kept warm and agitated while things are dipped in it to make filled chocolates.

    White chocolate is cocoa butter with sugar and vanilla and milk powder, but without any of the actual cocoa. As long as it's made with actual cocoa butter, it shares the melting/tempering/setting properties of actual chocolate, although the thermal profiles are a little different.

    (9/9)

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