Food, Home & Lifestyle
Bonbon Base: Tempered Chocolate Shell
Lesson time 18:57 min
Chef Dominique demystifies tempered chocolate by demonstrating two techniques that result in chocolate bonbon shells with a magnificently glossy finish.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Technique 1: Tabling • Technique 2: Seeding • When Tempered Chocolate Meets Water
Teaches French Pastry Fundamentals
James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel teaches his essential techniques for making delicious pastries and desserts in his first-ever online class.
Sign UpPreview
What's fabulous about chocolate, that you can build something beautiful, melt it, and give it a new life? I'm going to show you how to temper chocolate. And I'll show you a few tricks on how to do so the right way. Tempering chocolate is very important for the quality and the look of the chocolate, but, also, for the flavor of it. Smooth, beautiful, shiny, that's the perfect texture of chocolate. So tempering is a simple process which consists into first melting the chocolate. The chocolate always contains cocoa butter and the chocolate itself, so we want to melt everything down, all the molecules of cocoa butter and, essentially, remulsify them in the chocolate. This process is very important when you do a chocolate Beaumont. It will give you this beautiful little snap and have a nice texture as well. If the chocolate is not tempered, the color would be dull, and the texture will be not very pleasant to eat. There's two main techniques when it comes to tempering chocolate. The first way is sitting, which consists into adding chopped chocolate into melted chocolate. And the second one is tabling, which consists into taking melted chocolate, pouring into a countertop, and moving it around until it cools down the right way. So we're going to start right here in a double boiler. So we're just place some water in the pot. We're going to place our mixing bowl. So always use a metal bowl, so it doesn't melt. We're going to add the chocolate. I always prefer high end quality chocolate as high cocoa content. So this one is 70% chocolate. A very important things to know about chocolate is that it seizes with water. Just a few drops of water inside the chocolate, and it will be all over. The most important here is to make sure you scrape all the sides and all the bottom with a rubber spatula so the chocolate doesn't burn on the bottom. A very important step into tempering chocolate is actually your countertop. The best is always to have a marble countertop that is flat, so you can properly move the chocolate around. I will not suggest to do it against stainless steel or any wood. It wouldn't work at all. It would be very porous and the chocolate will go inside. On the tabling of the chocolate, what's very important before you even start is to make sure that you have a cool countertop. Always start here with some ice in a sheet pan because it's so hot in New York right now. I also do that in my kitchen sometimes when the AC is not working as well. I always put some sheet tray with some ice inside it too cool down the counter. So we're going to remove this. And very important, as we talked about earlier, not a single drop of water on the counter. So we might have some condensation and a little bit of water on the counter, so we're going to dry it very well. Very important to keep all of your tools dry. So we always melt the chocolate to begin at 50 degrees Celsius. 50 degrees is the temperature which the cocoa butter molecules ...
About the Instructor
Celebrated for his innovative twists on classic desserts, Cronut® creator and James Beard Award-winner Dominique Ansel has been called the “world’s best pastry chef.” In his MasterClass, Dominique teaches his essential techniques for perfect pastries. Learn baking and more with his precise methods, add classic recipes to your repertoire, and explore texture and flavor inspirations to delight friends and family with your own decadent desserts.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Dominique Ansel
James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel teaches his essential techniques for making delicious pastries and desserts in his first-ever online class.
Explore the Class