A guide to Cocoa Butter Silk
Cocoa Butter Silk Is A Major Step Forward In Chocolate Tempering
- 1It gives a great temper virtually every time
- 2It greatly reduces the number of steps to temper
- 3It simplifies the complexity of tempering
Silk is just tempered cocoa butter.
But more on that in a second. First let’s get a couple concepts straight.
Why does it help with tempering?
aThe right crystals
Tempering just sets your chocolate up with the right type of crystals. That right type is called Type V.
That sounds pretty cool already. But the simple idea we want you to come away with is if you have a whole bunch of Type V crystals in your chocolate at the tempering stage you’re going to end up with that beautiful snap and gloss we associate with well tempered chocolate.
bWhere they come from
But, wait, you might be asking where do these crystals come from?
Some arrive naturally in the heating and cooling phase of making chocolate but relying on them means relying on very explicit temperature control and even the most experienced chocolate makers can struggle with the reality of perfect temperature control.
cSeeding
So what is a budding maker to do? You seed the chocolate with a big ol’ whack of Type V crystals of course. This helps the tempering chocolate by setting up a sort of scaffolding which other crystals can form further on and give you that master chocolate vibe without having to fret over extremely precise temperatures.
And as you’ve probably guessed already, that’s just what Cocoa Butter Silk is. A big ol’ whack of Type V crystals in the form of tempered Cocoa Butter.
Think about it like using a starter for making great bread. Or kombucha.
Let the starter (Silk) do the legwork and you get to wow your friends with amazing chocolate. Or do it the Hard way. It’s up to you.
What should I do next?
Those are the basics. Now you can dig a bit deeper if you want by following some of the links below.
Watch
How To Make Cocoa Butter Silk
Buy Silk
Can’t find it in stock?
Why Silk is seasonal
Silk doesn’t travel well in the heat. If it melts on the way to you, it is still perfectly good cocoa butter, but it won’t temper your chocolate any more — the crystal structure that does the work is gone.
We could ship it cold, but the cost would be way out of proportion to the product. So when the weather warms up we take a break from making and shipping Silk, and bring it back once it cools down again. Usually that means a pause from spring into autumn, with the weather, not the calendar, setting the dates.
If you want to keep using it in the meantime, you can make your own with the right temperature-control equipment.
How To Make Your Own SilkFrom Ask the Alchemist
Two questions we get a lot
Are the Silk tempering temperatures the same for dark, milk and white chocolate?
The great thing about Silk is that one temperature fits all. Whether you are tempering dark, milk or white, you add solid silk at 95 F and mold at 92.5 F.
Can leftover Silk be used as ordinary cocoa butter?
Of course you can use it however you would use cocoa butter. It is cocoa butter. The only difference in non-silk cocoa butter and silk is that the latter is in a very specific structured crystal form. If you melt cocoa butter and silk, any crystals present in either one will go away and you are left with literally just unstructured cocoa butter.