For cooking and decorating various confectionery melted chocolate is often used. In order for the chocolate mass to turn out without lumps, homogeneous and tender, you need to know a few secrets.
Choosing the right chocolate
Tiles should not be too cheap, it is better to choose quality product high in cocoa butter. Chocolate should not contain artificial ingredients, dyes and flavors, the main components are cocoa beans (cocoa powder), sugar, cocoa butter, milk powder.
Porous and chocolate with various additives (nuts, raisins, fruit fillings) are not suitable for melting.
It is good if the wrapper indicates that it is a confectionery (culinary) or table product.
For inscriptions on pastries or cakes, it is better to use dessert chocolate, because. in the liquid state, it is thick, therefore it is most suitable for this purpose, but it is not suitable for glaze.
A great option for icing would be couverture: it melts beautifully even at high temperatures, and after hardening it turns into a crisp. The only negative is that this type of chocolate is quite expensive. Couverture can be purchased at pastry shops or specialty bakeries.
Basic rules for melting chocolate
First you need to crumble the tile into small pieces or grind it on a grater. The main thing to remember is not to overheat the chocolate, because it will become viscous and lumps will appear in it. The ideal melting temperature for dark chocolate is 50 degrees, for milk and white chocolate it is 45 degrees. So that the glaze is not lumpy and does not burn, it must be constantly stirred.
Never let water, steam or condensate get into the product: this will spoil its taste. All utensils used to make melted chocolate must be dry. Instead of a wooden, plastic or silicone spoon, which can absorb moisture, it is better to take a metal one.
It is not necessary to melt the chocolate to the end, the remaining solid pieces will quickly melt on their own.
To obtain a liquid dark chocolate glaze, add a little warm water to the melted mass (one tablespoon per 50 grams). Instead of water, you can add cream or melted butter to thin it.
Melting methods
On a water bath . The crushed tiles should be placed in a metal bowl (glassware for microwave oven also suitable), after making sure that it is dry. Boil some water in a saucepan, it should be just enough so that even when boiling it does not touch the bowl of chocolate placed on top. The chocolate should melt with steam. It is better to take a bowl that is larger than a pan so that steam does not get into the gaps between the walls, otherwise the icing will turn out to be too rare and will harden badly. Do not forget to stir the delicacy, you do not need to cover it with a lid.
In the microwave or oven . Place the chocolate pieces in a bowl or saucepan and set aside. hot oven on the highest "shelf" for a couple of minutes. temperature inside oven should be around 60 degrees.
If you decide to melt chocolate in the microwave, you need to select the “defrost” mode or set the oven to minimum power for 2-3 minutes. This is not the most convenient way, because every half a minute you will need to open the door and stir the mass, or put the microwave for several intervals of 30 seconds, stirring the icing in between.
On the stove
. Put a saucepan with a thick bottom on a small fire and pour the chopped chocolate into it. You can add a little heavy cream or butter. You need to stir the delicacy even after you remove it from the stove, so that the remaining pieces melt due to the heat from the bottom and walls of the pan.
Remember that chocolate to which cream or butter has been added hardens very quickly, so it must be used as soon as possible.
In the sun . In summer, on a hot day, when the temperature in the sun can rise to 45 degrees, dishes with chocolate can be left on the window or balcony for 30 minutes. As a result, the icing will turn out thick. If you need liquid chocolate, it is better to use another method.
How to melt chocolate for fondue
Fondue is liquid chocolate in which pieces of fruit, marshmallows, cookies, biscuits or berries are dipped. To prepare this dessert will do and bitter, and milk, and white chocolate. After adding milk and a little liquor, you need to melt the chocolate in a water bath. For 200 g of dark chocolate, 1 tablespoon of liqueur and half a glass of milk. For dairy and white chocolate liquid should be less. Pour the finished mass into a ceramic bowl and place a candle under it so that the fondue does not thicken.
In advance, you can prepare skewers or toothpicks for piercing berries and pieces of fruit.
Tricks
If you overheat the chocolate mass, causing it to melt unevenly or in lumps, it is not necessary to throw it away, it can be used to make brownies or cake.
Never use plastic containers for melting: this will ruin the taste. chocolate mass.
Chocolate before melting should be room temperature if you kept the tiles in the refrigerator, you need to get it in advance, because. a sudden change in temperature can adversely affect the consistency of the product. 
Melt white chocolate very carefully because it melts at a lower temperature than dark or milk chocolate and overheats more easily. The most suitable way is to melt in a water bath.
White chocolate that has become overheated and grainy can be salvaged by adding some melted butter, milk or cream (one tablespoon per 160 grams of chocolate). Sunflower oil Fragrance-free is also suitable for this purpose. Both milk and butter should be the same temperature as the chocolate. In this case, the mass will be unsuitable for coating desserts and it will not be possible to use it for decorations in complex ways. However, reconstituted white chocolate can be used as an ingredient in sauces, icings, doughs, or sprinkles.
If you want to add juice to white chocolate or food coloring, it is better to do this at the very beginning of the melting process. Thanks to this, the temperature of the liquid and the chocolate mass will be the same and it will be possible to avoid the setting of the chocolate.
The most versatile cake decoration is chocolate icing. It is done very quickly and easily. Learn how to melt chocolate so that the coating does not crack later.
How to melt chocolate for cake icing
There are two ways to melt chocolate, one of which is faster. So, the finished chocolate bar is easy to melt in a water bath and in a microwave oven.
But there is a caveat: if the chocolate is overheated, then the icing on the cake will definitely crack after three hours. In addition, at too high a temperature, it becomes too thick, lumps appear. It can burn and acquire an unpleasant bitterness. Therefore, it is better not to melt it in the microwave.
Consider one more feature. To avoid spoiling the icing, never pour water into melted chocolate or cover it with a lid. Water turns chocolate into a more liquid mass, depriving it of ductility. As a result, icing cannot be made according to this recipe.
To melt quality dark chocolate, follow the instructions below:
- Pour water into a wide saucepan and bring to a boil.
- Place the chopped chocolate bar pieces in a smaller bowl.
- When the water boils, reduce the heat to low.
- Place the bowl of chocolate on top of the saucepan. hot water. Make sure that the bottom of the bowl does not sink into boiling water and that no drops of water fall on the chocolate.
- Add a piece of butter to chocolate based on a 100-gram bar of 20-30 g. Then add fat (30-40 percent) cream - 2 tbsp is enough. l.
- Constantly stir the mixture with a silicone spatula so that all the ingredients are mixed.
The whole procedure will take no more than 10 minutes. The result is an excellent glaze that will easily fall on pastries and acquire a crispy even crust when cooled.
How to melt white chocolate on a cake
Melting white chocolate is harder than black chocolate. There is very little cocoa butter in such a dessert, and therefore the icing may come out heterogeneous.
To make white chocolate icing on the cake, learn a few subtleties:
- Boil water in a saucepan. When the water boils, turn off the heat and wait until the bubbles disappear.
- Only after that put the bowl with the broken chocolate bar on water bath.
- If you want to use melted white chocolate for writing, do not add cream or butter as additives. Just melt the chocolate until smooth.
- To make the icing for the cake, add a mixture of powdered sugar and 3% milk to the melted white chocolate. Milk will need 2 tbsp. l. and powder one glass per one bar of chocolate.
- To make the chocolate-milk-sugar mixture homogeneous, use a blender.
To coat the cake with white chocolate, wait until the mixture is warm, while baking should not be hot. Use a pastry spatula or spoon.
If you want to do beautiful decoration for a cake in the form of white chocolate frosting with smudges, add cream and butter to the recipe. A 125-gram tile will require 3 tbsp. l. cream and 50 g butter. Put all the ingredients together in a bowl and melt until smooth in a water bath.
Use the suggested recipes and melt the chocolate bar to decorate your cake. The procedure will take no more than 10 minutes.
And if you did everything right, then the coating will come out perfect. Show off your results!
What you need to know in order to quickly and correctly melt chocolate in a microwave or water bath?
Let's start with what not to do :
- if you do not have enough experience in culinary matters, then I do not advise you to heat the chocolate bar on the stove directly in the saucepan, because. the mass of chocolate is rather capricious, you need to work with it carefully, very painstakingly. Only an experienced chef can do this. In this method, obligatory observance of a certain temperature regime is important, correct proportions added milk and butter.
Consider two other options: how to melt chocolate in a water bath and how to melt chocolate in a microwave.
In both cases, nothing burns, no lumps form, cocoa does not separate from the butter. The process of complete melting takes only a few minutes.
But, for fast and proper cooking you need to choose the right chocolate. Not all tiles are able to melt evenly without creating streaks. Therefore, in no case do not buy a porous chocolate bar, it is completely unsuitable for melting. This is the second very important point, which should not be done in this situation.
The basic principle of the right choice - This is a high percentage of cocoa in the composition of the chocolate bar. The more cocoa, the better, but it should not be less than 55%. In addition to the high content of cocoa, the composition should not include herbal supplements, fats, nuts, raisins, various fillers. Properly melted chocolate should be viscous, thick, then it is easy to decorate ice cream with it, to make an inscription on the cake. After hardening, it gives a delicious crispy crust, becomes smooth, with a glossy sheen.
How to melt chocolate in the microwave
The time it takes to melt chocolate depends on the weight of the bar.
- We break the tile at room temperature into small pieces.
- We put the pieces in a small glass dish designed for cooking in the microwave.
- We place the dishes in the microwave at medium power for 30 seconds.
- Then we take out the dishes, mix the unmelted pieces.
- Repeat the procedure again until the chocolate is completely liquid.
With quick movements, we apply liquid chocolate to the cake, level it with a spatula or a wide knife, otherwise it will harden and you will have to start over.
How to melt chocolate in a water bath
- We take a saucepan and a metal, ceramic or glass bowl. The dimensions of the bowl should be such that it can be placed on a pan without a lid, and at the same time it does not reach to the bottom.
- Pour enough water into the pan so that the bowl does not come into contact with it. Thus, we built a water bath at home.
- Then put the chopped chocolate into a bowl.
- We place the bowl on a pot of water, put on the stove.
- Further, after the water boils, the chocolate in the bowl will begin to melt, and it must be stirred so that the process goes faster and more evenly.
We heat the tile in a water bath so that the chocolate becomes liquid, after that we remove it from the stove and use the mass to decorate confectionery, icing, etc. Both of the proposed methods are simple and easy to perform at home.
Anyone who has ever thought about making beautiful chocolate decorations or homemade chocolate candies, usually broke off at the stage of tempering chocolate. First, a marble table was required. Where can I get a marble table? In the ritual service, they told me sarcastically. Well, thanks ... And then. It is necessary to heat the chocolate to 45C, cool to 26C and heat again to 31C. In general, a nightmare.
And if the chocolate is not tempered, then it is dull, instantly melts, not hard, granular, with stains, tasteless. You can't get it out of the molds it's been poured into.
And so I just now rummaged through the Internet, studied the tempering of chocolate. My vigilant concern for the students, who would have to somehow make life easier in terms of tempering, did not give me peace. At least without a marble table to do!
And I came across a video about tempering from the Callebaut company. Which, as everyone knows, is one of the world leaders in the production of chocolate. What I saw shocked me. It turns out that to get tempered chocolate, you do not need to temper it at all! No marble tables, no heating and fast cooling! Honestly, I watched the video twice to make sure I understood correctly. And then she ran to try, because she did not believe it. It turned out EXCELLENT!
So, about this method of obtaining tempered chocolate, I have one good and one bad news.
The good news is, yes, tempered chocolate is made in one step without chilling and reheating. Melted and everything.
The bad news is that you still need a thermometer. And it’s better not to have a needle thermometer, with which you check the readiness of steaks or measure the temperature. sugar syrup. It is better to take a pyrometer - a non-contact thermometer. It produces results much faster. With my needle, the correct result is obtained in a minute, and with a pyrometer, in two seconds. I bought a pyrometer in Leroy Merlin, it cost 1880 rubles.
The method in short. We take tempered chocolate and melt it so that its temperature does not exceed 30C for white, 32 for dark and 34 for dark chocolate. Everything.
So. We take professional chocolate. It is professional, chocolate bars in supermarkets are intended for eating and are not tempered. Chocolate in kalets (medals) is convenient. If you have chocolate in a large bar, then you need to chop it into small, small pieces.
We take chocolate, pour it into a bowl, and microwave at maximum power for 30 seconds. After that, most of the chocolate will still be solid. We repeat the procedure, mix. This is where the chocolate melts. You can measure its temperature, you get 26 degrees. Then we go in portions of 10 seconds. Got it - mixed it up. You need to stop at the moment when ALMOST all the chocolate is melted, and its temperature reaches the limit for this type of chocolate. For example, we drown milk chocolate. Here it is 32 degrees. But there are still a lot of unmelted pieces! Stir, rubbing the unmelted pieces against the walls. After that, you can warm up literally another 5 seconds in the microwave. You can punch with a blender.
To check if we succeeded, daub our melted chocolate on the table or on any other cool surface. If the chocolate hardened in less than 1 minute, then everything turned out !!
Now we need to keep the chocolate at this temperature while we work with it. Well-tempered chocolate sets instantly! While you are enthusiastically writing out chocolate patterns. everything has already set in the bowl 🙂 there are two ways to maintain the temperature of the chocolate. The first method is a hot hair dryer. Just blow on the surface of the chocolate and it melts. Method two. A bowl of hot water from the tap. Place the bowl of chocolate in a bowl of hot water for 10 seconds, stir the chocolate, take out the bowl of chocolate. Don't forget, we must never exceed the temperature limit! And the water must not get into the chocolate, everything will go bad!
If you overheated the chocolate. Well, it happens to everyone. Add a handful of unmelted calets and blitz with a blender until the chocolate is below the temperature limit. But this only works if it is literally a couple of degrees overheated. If it’s too much, write wasted, you’ll have to temper it in a complicated way: heat it, cool it quickly, heat it up again.
Why does this method work without tempering? The funny thing is that professional chocolate is sold already tempered. That is, it has the correct crystal structure. And if we melt it so as not to exceed the temperature at which the chocolate loses this structure, then the chocolate will remain tempered! That is, all we need is not to break the crystal structure of tempered chocolate by overheating! Moreover, with this method, at some point, most of the chocolate melted, but there were still lumps, remember? These lumps are nothing but chocolate crystals. They have the right texture and the melted chocolate starts to crystallize around them.
I anticipate your question. Can this be done in a water bath without a microwave? I'm not sure, but you can try.
I forgot to tell. The temperature in the kitchen when working with chocolate should be 18-20C. it should be cool. Otherwise, nothing will freeze properly. And further. Do not put the chocolate in the refrigerator to harden, it will lose its luster.
In general, cheers! I put on decor, I'm happy as an elephant. I'll still be tomorrow. Liked.
Choose chocolate to melt. In addition to the basic types of chocolate - bittersweet, semi-sweet, milk and white - you can melt whole chocolate bars, chocolate chips or disks of special melting chocolate. They can all be melted using the same basic methods. Keep this in mind when deciding which chocolate to buy:
- Chocolate for melting can be bought in specialized bakeries or pastry shops. Such chocolate melts more easily and can withstand higher temperatures than regular chocolate.
- White chocolate is trickier because the heat can make it dry and crumbly.
- Unsweetened chocolate bars are also suitable for melting. Sugar can be added to taste after the chocolate has melted.
- If you have unpacked the chocolate, put it in a dry bowl away from the sink or other water sources.
- No matter which method you choose to melt chocolate, remember that even steam or condensation can ruin it.
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Melt chocolate at a low temperature. Too high a temperature can also damage the chocolate. Overheated chocolate can become dry and crumbly. To avoid this, make sure to always melt the chocolate slowly, at a low temperature, no matter which melting method you choose.
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Use vegetable oil. Sometimes even flawed chocolate can be saved from the bin by adding a drop or two. vegetable oil.
- Stir the water-hardened chocolate with a little vegetable oil. If only a small amount of chocolate is affected, cooking oil can help melt it.
- Stir the overheated chocolate with a little vegetable oil. The oil should help restore moisture.
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Prepare foods to be dipped in chocolate. After melting, the chocolate cools and hardens very quickly. Therefore, it is better to prepare all the products in advance in order to start dipping them in chocolate as quickly as possible.
- Make sure the fruits you use are already washed and dried. Wet fruit pieces can cause the chocolate to harden; be sure to dry strawberries, blueberries, and other freshly washed pieces of fruit well.
- Line a baking sheet with greased or parchment paper. If you dip fruits and berries into chocolate, put them on this sheet. After you finish dipping the fruit in the chocolate, put it in the fridge. The chocolate won't stick to the paper once it cools and hardens.
Keep chocolate away from water. Even one accidental drop of water can cause the chocolate to harden, its consistency or texture to be disturbed. Such flawed chocolate will not melt evenly, no matter how long you stir it.
