Cocoa butter Silk

The care and feeding of your cocoa butter Silk

Cocoa Butter Silk, A Primer

Silk is just tempered cocoa butter.

But more on that in a second. First let's get a couple concepts straight.

Tempering is really literally just a step of making chocolate that 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 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.

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.

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.

Those are the basics. Now you can dig a bit deeper if you want by following some of the links below.