Chocolate and white chocolate to be used in candy making are designated ‘couverture’ chocolate. Couverture chocolate contains a relatively high proportion of cocoa solids and cocoa butter as compare with other ingredients.
The cocoa butter melts and dissipates at a low temperature, giving it a beautiful mouthfeel as well as giving shine, gloss and snap to chocolate.
The extra cocoa butter makes the melted couverture chocolate very fluid and easy to work with. Most professional chefs use couverture. It is the perfect chocolate to use for dipping truffles and candies and for molding because it makes a thin coating and it’s also great to use for baking.
Couverture chocolate must be tempered to stabilize the emulsification of cocoa solids and butterfat before it is used for dipping or molding.
Tempering gives chocolate a glossy sheen and allows it to set up quickly.
Tempering process enables chocolate to be stores at room temperature for longer without loss of texture or flavor.
What is couverture chocolate?
The word chocolate is derived from the Aztecs names for the tree, and for the drink they prepared from the beans. These words live on in Mexican today as ‘choclatl’ for the drink and ‘cacauatl’ for the tree. Chocolate was first cultivated as a crop, by ancient Mesoamerican peoples. They used cacao beans to create a frothy chocolate drink flavored with spices.
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