by Aleksandr Nenoglyadov

CHOCOLATE STUCK IN POLYCARBONATE MOLD?

This article is about why do chocolate stuck in mould and how to fix it
If you're in rush and need quickly unmould chocolate, just put it into freezer for 30 minutes, it will help you to release your bonbons from the mould. But I highly recommend spent time on reading this theory post to undertand why it happens.
There are a lot of information about tempering technics in internet, but not so many sources provide easy enough theory based explanation why and how does it work. For me, personally, understanding the crystallisation of cocoa butter (aka tempering) greatly enhanced the ability to consistently achieve excellent results with chocolate.
chocolate tempering - five crystal forms of cocoa butter fats
Cocoa butter - the main component of any chocolate - is fat. Fats have crystalline structure and in case of cocoa butter they are polymorphic: cocoa butter crystals can exist in six different forms.
When we say "to temper chocolate", we mean to control formation of those crystals in a specific way.
To say more precisely, we would like to develop enough Form V crystals to make a chocolate which has proper gloss, brittle snap and does not develop bloom during storage. Form V the only stable of those six ones which can be practically developed. Form VI is stable as well, but it takes significant time to develop, so it's impossible during the manual tempering. All other crystals are unstable, which means they form and melt at lower temperatures, so chocolate tends to be soft and does not display good contraction!
Chocolate contraction - that's why bonbons might not pop out from the mould properly, it's just about poor tempering, not a magic.
So, how to get enough stable crystals? There are a couple of factors to form them correctly during tempering: temperature, agitation, time and percentage of seed crystals.

If you use professional chocolate, look at the package. You will see a temperature curve, it tells you at which temperature chocolate should be melted to fully dissolve all the crystals, then how it should be cooled down and what is the work temperature. You can also find those curves in internet for the particular type of chocolate. Always follow those numbers if you temper chocolate manually. I'll tell more about practice next time.
Agitation plays a key role, as it results in the formation and distribution of many small cocoa butter crystals, which seed the chocolate and thus ensure proper setting and shelf life.

Time is probably the most overlooked parameter. Forming crystals takes time. The same with melting. If you cool down your chocolate to 29C and then warm up it up to 32, you should wait a bit, until those unstable crystals formed at 29C will be melted completely. Such things come from practice, but you can always check yourself by testing a sample using a spoon.

Underseeding and overseeding - 1% of stable crystals formed during tempering is enough to start chain reaction in chocolate which forms other stable crystals. You don't want to have less than 1% or way more. If you have too much, you will get think chocolate liquor, which is difficult to use and it won't set properly with good contraction. If too less, crystals won't be formed evenly and it's likely you will get fat blooms.

That's mostly it about theoretical part. Though it might look like complicated topic, I can guarantee, once you get theory part, it will give you an advantage in getting consistent results.

I'm looking forward to telling you about practical part. We will consider all the possible methods of tempering which you can do at home and not only.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it. BTW, if you are struggling with creating your own recipes, consider theconfit.com. There are plenty of free recipes, plus you can enhance them with our virtual pastry chef, and you can try it for free!

Below you will find a comments block, I'm looking forward to answering your questions!
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