Chocolate Bloom

Last week I decided to revisit the Chocolate Bloom experiment.  A chocolatier at Oh! Chocolate gave me a tip: if my melted chocolate bars aren't blooming, stir them with a pretzel or something.  Without proper tempering, the stirred chocolate should quickly bloom.

So, last Wednesday, I liquified Hershey bars in the microwave, in the oven, and with a hair dryer, and dipped nearly a pack of pretzel sticks.  At the end of the day there was no bloom anywhere.  I decided to give up and start eating the pretzels.

But the bloom had gotten started, all right.  By Friday, my chocolate bars were getting speckled.  By today, they were spectacular.

These Hershey bars were melted twice in the microwave, then left in the kitchen window for a week.  The bars on the left, which had been stirred, definitely bloomed.  But so did the unstirred bars on the right.  (Top: milk chocolate, bottom: Special Dark.)

This one was my favorite: it looks as if it had turned inside-out.

And what about those pretzels? By today, the uneaten survivors had bloomed too.

The lesson? If you're trying to create chocolate bloom, be patient.  It might take a few days for the process to really work.