Won Me

When you want to make chocolate candy, you should temper your chocolate especially if you’re utilizing pure, better grade chocolate. By tempering alone, you can turn chocolate into firm, velvety, and lustrous confections. If you don’t temper, the chocolate candies will be unattractive, blotchy, gritty and crumbly due to blooming, a chalky, streaky sheen on the surface of chocolates.

Cocoa butter, the ingredient from which you make your chocolates, contains fatty acids which come together into six dissimilar types of crystals, a process called polymorphous crystallization. Tempering alone prevents this from happening. Because all chocolates contain cocoa butter, tempering is absolutely necessary.

The molecules in the cocoa butter bond jointly to form crystals, the type and quantity of which depend on the temperature maintained throughout tempering.

The melting and freezing temperatures of these crystals are also unique. Near the freezing point, these crystals transform the liquid molecules into solid. It’s on the concentration and regularity in size of the crystals that the stability of the created solid depends. Tempering alone makes these crystals stable and the crystals maintain stability at room temperatures. Only at their melting point of 96F do the crystsals in chocolate totally disappear, hence the need to temper in order to create the crystals again.

It’s also imperative that you keep precise temperatures and for this a Mercury-Gauge Chocolate Thermometer that has the capacity to read even low temperatures like 80F would be most helpful.

Tempering is done in three stages: heating, cooling and re-heating. By not maintaining accurate temperatures, you give scope for the other crystals to dominate proliferation and curtail success in the tempering process by not allowing type V crystals to form. Without type V crystals, you cannot create shiny, smooth, crisp, firm and stable chocolates. All these qualities are retained until the chocolate reaches near-body temperatures. Beyond that, temper will be lost and re-tempering becomes necessary.

After melting, the chocolate is cooled by working upon it on a heat-absorbing surface such as a marble slab and the result are type IV and type V crystals. These two crystals become the “seeds” that guide the bonding process of the other crystals. If you heat the chocolate again, type IV crystals are done away with and type V crystals remain. The temperatures you must maintain in these steps vary from one variety of chocolate to another.

Chocolates cannot be subjected to dipping, molding and sculpting if their temperatures have gone below the correct chocolate temperature zones because then they would’ve been ruined. You can extend the tempered state of chocolates by setting your chocolate-filled bowl on a bain-marie or a hot pad.

The concept of brief encounters, even romantic encounters, with a stranger recurs often in the verses of Walt Whitman.

Take, for example, these lines from one of the inscriptions that Whitman wrote to his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

“Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me,

why should you not speak to me?

And why should I not speak to you?”

Clearly, Walt Whitman sees brief, chance encounters with strangers as an appropriate opportunity for the strangers to interact. Perhaps the communication will allow the strangers to become friends.

In the lines of “To A Stranger,” Whitman indicates that the strangers might become intimate and affectionate friends. The narrator in the poem is comfortably able to imagine himself creating a past history with the passing stranger and to foresee the opportunities for them to enjoy each other in physically affectionate ways.

Here’s a line from “Song of the Open Road,” written in 1860.

“Do you know what it is, as you pass, to be loved by strangers? Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?”

And from Whitman’s “Carol of Occupations.”

“If you meet some stranger in the streets, and love him or herwhy I often meet strangers in the street, and love them.”

Also consider this excerpt from “Who Is Now Reading This?”
“Or may-be a stranger is reading this who has secretly loved me,

Walt Whitman’s verses create a sense of comfort with the idea that strangers can longingly look at each other and act upon their impulses. Perhaps the next encounter will be with one’s soulmate, as in the line, “You must be he I was seeking,” from “To A Stranger.”

It seems reasonable to presume that Walt Whitman met many strangers in his lifetime and enjoyed the encounters. It’s been said that Whitman was one of America’s first self-identified homosexuals and his lifestyle may have reflected his ease with and attraction to strangers.

“To A Stranger” is also known as “Calamus 22.” “Calamus” is a series or cluster of 45 poems that were included in the editions of Leaves Of Grass.

The “Calamus” series is about “manly attachment,” and it’s a series in which Whitman will “tell the secret of my nights and days.” Both quotes are from the first poem in the “Calamus” series.

Among the concluding lines in “To A Stranger,” Walt Whitman says, “I am not to speak to you.” a phrase typical of a man following orders, as in society’s judgment against forbidden love. Yet undaunted and un-discouraged Whitman says, “I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

It seems that love, even with a stranger, will find a way.

To A Stranger

By Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! you do not know

How longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking,

Or she I was seeking

(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely

Lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall’d as we flit by each other,

Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,

Were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become

not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,

face, flesh as we pass,

You take of my beard, breast, hands,

in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you

when I sit alone or wake at night, alone

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

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Garry Gamber is a public school teacher and entrepreneur. He writes articles about real estate, health and nutrition, and internet dating services. He is the owner of http://www.Anchorage-Homes.com and http://www.TheDatingAdvisor.com.