Ina Garten's Simple Trick For Tempering Chocolate Is Genius

The holidays are just around the corner, meaning there are plenty of reasons to make delicious desserts for family, friends, or for yourself. If you're thinking of making homemade peanut butter cups or chocolate-covered fruit, or maybe you just want melted chocolate over a scoop of ice cream, you'll need to know how to temper chocolate. Who better to teach you a superior way to get that chocolate drizzly than celebrity chef, Ina Garten?

In a YouTube video for Food Network, Garten demonstrates her technique using white chocolate bark. After deciding what type of dessert you want to make, pick out some high-quality chocolate (if you're adding it to a cake recipe, you'll get better results with baking chocolate) and cut it up before putting it into a microwave-safe bowl. Microwave the chocolate in 30-second increments until it is melted. When testing this out myself, it took me around two minutes to get a 3.5-ounce Lindt chocolate bar to melt. The final step is to add more chopped chocolate to the bowl and fold it in with the rest. This will temper the sweet treat, as the added chocolate cools down the melted contents of the bowl.

There's more than one way to temper chocolate. But before you try another technique it's important to remember that not all types of chocolate respond the same way to heat. Different chocolates melt at different temperatures. Dark chocolate needs to be brought down to around 86-90 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas milk or white chocolate can be cooled at 84 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now, if you want to temper chocolate in a way that doesn't involve a microwave, you can easily do it on the stove. The process is similar — you will need your chocolate chopped and put into a heat-safe bowl. You can also add a small amount of shortening to make it glossy. Once you have your bowl set up, place it over a pan of simmering water, but don't let the water touch the bowl. Once the chocolate has melted, place the small dish into a larger bowl of cold water to cool it to the temperature you want — around 82 degrees Fahrenheit.