AKA Let’s bring science and technology up in this bitch.
[For parts I and II of this series, see here and here!]
I swear this blog is not only about chocolate making. I am a bit behind in my writing in general, but given how enamored I am with my new hobby, it makes sense that my writing is a bit chocolate-centric for the time being.
Two weeks ago, I spent several days in a row entrenched in chocolate. I had a few items to make on my chocolate “to do” list, including chocolate frogs for a Harry Potter themed dinner party! Additionally, I wanted to experiment with a new method of chocolate tempering. Up to this point, I have been using a double boiler or microwave to melt my chocolate, and then the seeding method to temper it. It worked well, but was very labor intensive. Lots of stirring, and it was always a bit of a chore trying to get those last chunks of chocolate melted smooth once the temperature dropped closer to the desired 82-84F.
I already have an Anova sous vide that I use mostly for cooking 145F soft boiled eggs via Kenji López-Alt’s recipe, and the occasional steak. But while spending all that time furiously stirring chocolate and diligently measuring the temperature every few seconds, I found myself wondering if there was a way to use the precision temperature control of sous vide to make my chocolate tempering work easier.
I had my concerns though. As I mentioned in my first chocolate post, water is the enemy of chocolate. Just a few drops of water in melted chocolate can cause the entire batch to seize up and be ruined! Part of me kinda wrote off the idea of sous vide for chocolate, because of this.
Ridiculously, I didn’t do a google search for “tempering chocolate sous vide” right away. I just wondered about it idly in my head, and had a few brief conversations with Will and some friends where I pondered this question aloud. But after another afternoon spent battling a particularly viscous batch of chocolate back into temper via furious stirring like some of deranged witch at her cauldron, I finally looked around the internet for some answers in re: sous vide and chocolate.
Turns out: yep, you can totally temper chocolate via sous vide. RIGHT ON.
See the Serious Eats article I just linked for more details, but basically, after sealing dark chocolate in the vacuum sealed bag, you drop it in a water bath set to 115F to melt it, taking the bag out occasionally to massage the bag to help the chunks melt. Once melted, you adjust the sous vide down to 81F, and pour in some ice until it reaches that temperature. I double checked the sealed chocolate with my infrared thermometer (an excellent upgrade for chocolate work, much easier than having to clean a digital probe thermometer after every measurement) to ensure it reached this same temp to allow form V crystals to develop, before whacking the temperature up to 90F working temp (which also melts the other “non desirable” crystal structures down). During this whole process, I regularly massaged the bag to agitate the chocolate and hopefully help ensure even crystal formation.
The process was amazingly easy, and so NEAT AND TIDY. No melted chocolate covering bowls/spatulas/thermometers/etc during the initial melting process, everything was contained in the vacuum sealed bag. I was getting excited. SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE I thought! Sous vide was a game changer!
Once the chocolate was up to 90F working temp, I removed the bag from the water bath and dried it thoroughly. I snipped a corner off with scissors and basically had an awkward piping bag full of tempered chocolate ready to use! Again: so neat and tidy! I did a quick temper test on a strip of parchment, and it looked pretty good!
Unfortunately, that day was a bit of a scorcher here. It was nearly 80 degrees inside my house (we don’t have AC so if it’s hot outside, it gets hot inside), which wasn’t great for chocolate work. I noticed that my chocolate shell layer in the mold wasn’t setting at ambient room temperature, as per usual. It remained resolutely glossy and liquid, refusing to turn to satin and set. Was it the heat, or was it the sous vide methodology? A bit of both? I am still not quite sure what was to blame.
In order to get the chocolate set and ready for me to pipe in the ganache filling, I had to pop the mold in the fridge. That seemed to do the trick, and I proceeded to fill the shells with ganache. In the meantime, I was able to seal the remaining chocolate off in the bag, and throw it back into the 90F water bath to keep warm until I was ready to seal my truffles! It was amazing! I still reached in there to agitate the chocolate regularly (I’m not sure if agitation was still necessary at this stage, but I did it to be safe).
Once my truffles were done and set (which seemed to require longer in the fridge than normal, again I’m not sure if the unusual heat in my kitchen was to blame or if it I had done something off in my tempering process), I popped the truffles out of the mold. They looked great! So shiny!
But once I ate one, I noticed that the texture was off. The shells did not have the distinctive snap of tempered chocolate all the way through, they seemed a bit soft in spots. Nooooooo!
I will have to try sous vide tempering again now that the temperature has dropped back to “normal” in my house. I want to determine whether this subpar chocolate was a result of non-ideal ambient room temperature or my sous vide methodology.
Hopefully I can get a good result on my next attempt, because the benefits of tempering chocolate via sous vide are plentiful!
Pros of sous vide tempering:
- It’s so lovely to not have to spend so much time and energy stirring. #lazyaf
- Having the melted chocolate contained in a vacuum sealed bag for so much of the process is so neat and tidy!
- Way fewer bowls/spatulas/etc to wash!
- It was also great to be able to re-seal the remaining chocolate in the bag, and pop it back in the 90F water bath to keep it warm at usable temperature until I was ready to seal the truffles off. Super convenient.
Cons of sous vide tempering:
- Using single-use plastic vacuum-sealing bags to keep the water away from the chocolate is necessary for sous vide, but is kinda wasteful and bad for the environment.
- My hands turned prune-y from submerging them to retrieve the bag of chocolate to squeeze and agitate the chocolate every few minutes.
- Still TBD how much of this was to blame on ambient room temperature or user error on my part, but my truffles that used sous vide tempered chocolate did not turn out as snappy as my truffles that used chocolate tempered via the seeding method.
Stay tuned for my next post, in which I explore yet another method of chocolate tempering!
In the meantime, here’s some pictures of my other chocolate creations that I made the same week I was experimenting with sous vide:
