To temper chocolate, you need a cook's thermometer. There's a lot of useful stuff available from Lakeland in the UK.

In the technique which follows, I'll always give three figures, separated by | - these are for dark, milk and white chocolate respectively. Also, don't wash the thermometer between stages, you don't want to get water in the chocolate.

Bulk tempering
1. Put 1/4 of the chocolate aside and melt the rest at 55-58C/131-136F | 45-50C/113-122F | 45-50C/113-122F, stirring slowly to ensure it doesn't stick and burn on the bottom of the pan. Take it off the heat.
2. Pour off 2/3 of the the melted chocolate into a bowl, and add the 1/4 reserved to it. Wait for the temperature to drop to 28-29C/82-84F | 27-28C/81-82F | 26-27C/79-81F. If any chocolate remains unmelted at this stage, remove it to stop the chocolate thickenening by overcrystallising in the next stage.
3. Pour back onto the remaining 1/3 of the melted chocolate, and if necessary gently heat it to 30-32C/88-90F | 29-30C/84-86F | 28-29C/82.84F. It's now tempered and ready to pour into moulds, Don't raise its temperature above this again or you'll lose the temper.


This is the flashy kind of tempering used by chefs to show off. You need a cold marble surface and a flexible thin steel spatula at least 8"/20cm long.
The technique works by pre-seeding some of the chocolate the rest will crystallise around.
1. Melt all the chocolate at the temperature shown in stage 1 above.
2. Pour 2/3 of it onto the cold marble and move around using a spatula or scraper until it starts to thicken - the temperature drops 4-5C. Chocolate dropped from the stirrer stands proud in peaks.
3. This is now pre-seeded, pour it back into the rest, and mix. Again, you may need to gently reheat it, but be careful with the temperature.
5. Dip a cold knife tip in to check, it should harden evenly in about 3 minutes at a room temperature of 20C.

Although it is preferable not to use a fridge, we are dealing with readers in the US whose ambient temperature can be of the order of the temperatures shown, making working difficult if not impossible without doing so.

And yes, folks, I had the privilege of completing Cadbury's linear programming for their recipe for them!