For a lot of delicious recipes, chocolate is an essential ingredient. You can bake chocolate into a cake as part of the batter, use chocolate chips to add some flavour to your breakfast (I recommend a combination of cranberries and dark chocolate in your yoghurt), and you can melt it and use it to coat your cookies. Either way, chocolate is versatile and fun to work with. However, maybe you are hesitant to melt chocolate because the process seems daunting or because you had some bad experiences. Your chocolate burned, or you have never done it before, and you are not sure where to start. Well, a little bit of knowledge and some simple tricks will make melting chocolate a quick and simple step on the road to culinary adventures!
Chocolate is supposed to melt on our tongue when we eat it. This is one of the things that makes chocolate feel and taste good in our mouths. So when chocolate is being made in a chocolate factory, food scientists try to develop chocolate that will melt at about 36 degrees Celsius; the human body temperature.[1]McGee, Harold. On Food And Cooking. New York: Scribner, 2011. Print.[2]Afoakwa, Emmanuel Ohene. Chocolate Science And Technology. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print.
To make sure you do not burn your chocolate when you melt it, you can use several techniques. When melting chocolate at home in your kitchen, however, the easiest way to melt it is Bain Marie. We know that chocolate starts to melt around 36 degrees Celsius. That means that we do not need a lot of heat to get it to the stage we like it to be at; liquid.
Melting Chocolate
- Grab a pot and put some water in it.
- Put it on the stove and turn on the heat, but very low! Remember, we only need the chocolate to get to 36 degrees Celsius. Boiling water is 100 degrees Celsius and that temperature will cause your chocolate to burn for sure.
- Put a bowl with the chocolate in it on top of the pot and stir regularly.
- The inside of the bowl should feel warm but not hot when you touch it with your finger.
Tip: It is nice to use a bowl made from glass. Glass is a bad heat conductor. It transfers the heat from the water badly to the chocolate so even when the water in your pot gets too hot because you were not paying attention, it will not burn your chocolate. When you use a metal bowl, you are using a good heat conductor so your chocolate will be less forgiving if you forget to keep a close eye on it.
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References
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