Tempering chocolate at higher altitudes

[Darienne]

Ruth and I have been discussing my disaster with making caramel yesterday...all turned out well in the end...and the temperature changes for cooking at higher altitudes. I suppose that this holds true for tempering chocolate too?

I have a little Revolation I with me for tempering purposes...yeah, yeah, I know ...will it work fine at this higher altitude? About 4000 feet. Or is it somehow internally geared to work only at sea level???? I'll obviously try it this afternoon and see.

As for tempering by hand...should I subtract the 8 degrees from each of the chocolate prescripted temperatures? Makes sense, I know, but I feel a bit uneasy about it.

Thanks.

[Marmalade]

Altitude doesn't matter for tempering chocolate. I'm at 9,500 ft. and there are no adjustments necessary. However, for caramels, brittles, and anything else involving sugar, you need to determine the boiling point for water for your altitude. Subtract that amount from 212 F, and that's the number of degrees you should adjust all your sugar boiling points by.

[Darienne]

Altitude doesn't matter for tempering chocolate. I'm at 9,500 ft. and there are no adjustments necessary. However, for caramels, brittles, and anything else involving sugar, you need to determine the boiling point for water for your altitude. Subtract that amount from 212 F, and that's the number of degrees you should adjust all your sugar boiling points by.

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Thanks for your response. It makes sense. It's fat molecules, not water we are dealing with. Since I wrote the post, I have been delving about online and have found articles...not read yet really...that support changing the temperatures for high altitude and the opposite.

I'll just try the Revolation later and report back my own findings.

Thanks again.

edited note: Come to think of it, I don't know why the altitude should not affect fat molecules in the same way it does water. But then it's all a bit beyond me sometimes.

Edited November 1, 2008 by Darienne (log)

[Lisa Shock]

edited note: Come to think of it, I don't know why the altitude should not affect fat molecules in the same way it does water.  But then it's all a bit beyond me sometimes.

Altitude affects cooking because at higher altitudes there is less air pushing down on top of things. (well, being pulled down by gravity, actually) This is why, for example, one uses less baking powder in a cake at high altitude. If one used the sea level amount of baking powder, the cake would rise too high too quickly and there wouldn't be enough cake structure to support the network of air bubbles. (breads are less affected because of the resilience of gluten)

Water boils at a lower temp at high altitude because there is less air pushing down on it to keep the water vapor in the solution. It doesn't affect temperature related events, though, this is why some foods do not cook well when boiled at high altitude -they never get as hot as they do at sea level.

Tempering chocolate is an exercise in manipulating the various crystalline structures of cocoa butter. There are six different types of crystals that can form in chocolate, the goal in tempering is to develop the beta crystals and suppress the other 5 types. This is done by a combination of careful application of heat and motion, neither of which is affected by the amount of air pushing down on it.

I hope this helps! I lived in Santa Fe for 15 years; at about 7,800 feet. (I lived partway up a mountain.)

[Chris Hennes]

HOST'S NOTE: The more general discussion on cooking (not tempering) at high altitudes can be found here.

[ejw50]

maybe this is the Materials engineer in me talking, but all phase diagrams are affected by pressure to some degree. The most commonly known being Carbon, where heat and pressure turn it into diamond and you can substitute one for another. It's just that for liquids to gasses dP/dT is usually much larger than for solid-solid phase transitions.

That is, the effect at 'altitude' is still there, just too small to measure.