How Hard Candy Is Made | WIRED

You have to work with tastes, smells, touch and sight, but you also have to listen to what is happening. That balance of the five senses is a kind of turning point where you can do almost anything with our sweets. We look back in time. Dating back to the 19th century, the Victorian period, many of our equipment was manufactured in that period. We are practically the only ones who have started over using the type of equipment, tracking them and restoring them today. make plum shaped sugar candies, eggnog image candies and peppermint

candy

canes, first we make the

candy

canes, the first thing we do is cook the sugar, it is mixed with water and we are boiling all the water, we need to use two sugars to disrupt the crystallization process sucrose and glucose if we only used sugar and water when it

hard

ens it would turn back into table sugar and become granular hot pot.

We have a team of five candy makers here at Lofty Pursuits. Hurry and Jake were working with me today, everyone in the store knows when we make peppermint candy because peppermint has a weird reaction on your skin, it makes you feel great. If someone was somehow slightly congested or had any allergy problems at this time, after that, they will only take 25 pounds of candy canes. less than an ounce of peppermint oil when we make candy with multiple colors we add the food coloring to the table we do this so we can segment and separate the different areas of color one of our specialized tools it doesn't look like a tool it's a giant table the top is Made from a half inch piece of steel and has a water circulation system.

We use it to quickly cool hot sugar where it comes into contact with the table it will cool quickly but the parts will not. on contact it doesn't cool as quickly, so by bending the candy we can even out the heat and choose the temperature we want, we might want it to act more like a liquid or more like a solid or somewhere in between, okay? We are already very close to stretching time. Next, we make the amber sugar white. This is a hand forged iron hook. It is thicker than most other hooks we found. This allows it to radiate heat better so the candy is less likely to stick to the hook.

We have several hooks in the store, but the one I used today comes from a store called Mullaine's that opened in 1848 in Cincinnati. We change the amber for white. We tossed it about 75 times each time we folded it, it trapped air bubbles in the inside those air bubbles are cool because those little round bubbles reflect the light out and the random light they reflect looks white, then we started making the stripes on the heating table we make sure my stripes are super uniform thickness candy canes didn't always have stripes the first candy canes were actually white if you look at victorian greeting cards which is the best way to see the history of candy canes because they appeared on them, it was not until the end of the 19th century that the first stripes appeared and this is partly because people thought that peppermint was a white color.

I'm just waiting for them to stick. One of the things we have to be careful about with candy is that the colors will migrate from one part to another on the candy canes if they are too hot, the red would actually bleed into the white parts of the candy and we don't want this to happen , we do it by controlling the temperature and the only way we can really know the temperature at this point is by feeling We know how stiff the candy needs to be and that just comes with practice income. The batch roller twists the candy while forcing it down the cone.

We don't want it to go too far, but it is useful in this case to a certain extent because you put a spiral on the candy cane, the first candy cane is born, we add a spiral with our hands but we do it in the machine first then we add the hook on the candy cane the hook on the top of the candy cane is

made

by Bend it if you think about it it behaves like a tube the white inside is softer than the outside so we have to bend it very carefully we use our hands very similar way to a pipe bender that a plumber uses so we have a little guide that we use to make sure they are all a consistent size and that is how we make candy canes, then we will make the candy, we start the process the same way, boiling the sugar and adding the flavor, the sugar plum is a candy where everything is the same color everything else we use several colors so we can cheat a little we can add the coloring and the flavor in the pot at the same time hot pot and when we pour it on the table we can pour it thinner and over a larger surface area, the areas will cool faster, it just speeds up the candy making process.

We can tell by the texture of the sugar, the temperature of the sugar and then we add the citric acid because the citric acid will burn if the sugar is too hot and the citric acid. acid is the acid that makes the flavors right, most of these flavors are acid free and most fruits have acid, it just gets incredibly thin, the problem with teaching candy making is that it's all about touch , the consistency changes constantly, there is a point where we want to cut it we want to cut it when the outside is

hard

and the inside is still liquid so we can average the temperatures.

You can see it's like it starts to get a little more compact, but then when we want to manipulate it, we want it to have a more clay-like consistency when we were making the initial shape, but we wanted to make it harder to hold the shapes once it was

made

. , it went from being a liquid to now behaving like a non-Newtonian fluid and that means that right now it is flowing like a liquid but if we put a lot of pressure on it it would behave like a solid. I still have a pair of scissors from my great-grandfather when he was a tailor and it probably cost him two weeks' wages to buy them, but he kept them for a while. my whole life and he died before I was born the things I have here to make these sweets I don't feel like an owner of them, I'm just a caretaker because they will be here generations after me and I have to keep them for the candy makers who follow me.

This is a 150 year old piece of equipment. The machine is a fruit dropping roller. We do this by passing the candy through it and taking out the shape at the other end. Today we use the diamond shape. Not only does diamond candy look pretty, it also offers eight surfaces to sit on in your mouth, so the flavor spreads faster. That's why we like this for subtle flavors like sugar plum. These candy machines haven't changed much in the last 150 years. They were developed by Thomas. mills at brothers in Philadelphia, these machines are made of cast iron, they weigh 20 or 30 pounds each and the rollers are solid brass, everything needs to be non-stick and like a cast iron skillet, we have made it non-stick. working with oil to the surface I'm going to pre-cool some pieces here the candy comes out of the machine onto the candy cooling table water is being sprayed on the bottom of the top there can't be any water on the candy making it sticky this freezes the caramel in place as soon as it comes out of the machine the rollers shape it but it is a table itself that cools it we slide it on the table when it is still behaving with the consistency of shoe leather.

It is not hard as a rock, but the candy sheet comes out connected by sugar, which we call flash. The flash holds the candy together when it gets to the machine, but now we have to get rid of it. We need to separate the pieces and we do it. When dropping the candy, the last thing we have to do is get rid of all the sugar powder, the remains of the flash, we have to do this because the candy, under its own weight, just like glass, will fuse to some extent with several candy manufacturers. use different things i just use an old fryer that we bought for this purpose and this is how we make the dropped candy finally we will make the eggnog cut rock image candy we start the process the same way by boiling the sugar and adding the pot flavor hot i call it sweet picture, the correct term is cut rock, it was originally invented in Blackpool, England, sometimes it is also called Blackpool rot mmm, it smells like Blackpool pink rock, sold in one large piece with full art like a rock stick, they call it like What we're doing is taking bite-sized pieces, which is the cut part of the rock, okay, come on, the metal of the equipment is important.

All our metal is mild steel, not stainless steel, due to nature itself which makes it not. rust is not magnetic sugar likes to stick to things that have the same temperature and the table if heated will become sticky to the candy the bars if they get too hot they will have become sticky to the candy with the image of the candy present we needed the interior was cold because we needed to keep the details in place. I say we should come to the table right now. Mine is good. I don't know if yours is a little hot, but we have time to cool it down.

I did this by cooling the corners of the gifts, but we want the outside to be warmer so the candy can slide around it, share its heat, and stretch it so the image expands. Do you think it's enough for a little more, a little more? One of the fun things about the candy image is that it is possibly the most creative candy we make and one of the most complex ones we have for creating three-dimensional art, which is a good tone in the case of the present, we wanted the interior color of the present. the light blue was opaque, so when we wrapped it with a light blue wrap, the light went through the light blue, bounced and hit your eye and it looked more spectacular, beautiful, that technique is called cloisonné boxes.

We are making a little box for the light to bounce in and out and by sharpening the candy circles that I made like candy straws that are filled with white candy I was able to make the illusion of a bow or make the shape of the bow because what good would a gift? You won't have a bow, but the bow is designed to be much taller than what you ended up with. I let the weight of the candy, being a non-Newtonian fluid, give it its final shape. Once we have the shape in the center we pat it with the white candy this is for two reasons one, it moves it away from the outside edge, when the light goes through that wrapper on the edge of the gift it bounces back towards you so we have than to make an outer candy wrapper without pulling, the taken out candies are like little air bubbles, so if we just cut your white candy, it might crumble, you might make a diagonal cut, but if we wrap it in the candy without wrapping and without pulling , we can create an outer level that will produce a crack around it when we cut it and make smoother pieces, then we need to use gravity to make a uniform reduction.

Our goal here is to make a three-dimensional candy funnel. We have learned how to stretch the image down and scale it. without losing the detail without losing pieces and without it being distorted and that is what sometimes takes years to master. Then we put the candy on the batch roller and throw it before we have a batch roller. We had one person rolling the candy while another pulled. but now that person is replaced by high tech, high tech circa 1910 and this badge roller spins the candy. Candy is a non-Newtonian fluid. If we left that cylinder alone, it would flatten and spread all over the table, but by keeping it moving, we keep it as a solid object, then we have to pull it, we have to pull it gently because we pull it too fast, it will break when it's thick, so we're pulling it down gently, scaling it very, very evenly.

We press then we cut the pieces, we do this on our canvas, a little candy anvil because we are sugar makers, this lifts it off the table and allows us to cut it with our chopper and the knife hits it very hard, all the pieces become bitten . in size and each piece has an identical or almost identical image, people seem to forget that history is not that far away and neither is the future and that we are here in the middle being caretakers of what surrounds us. ideas people friendships loves and if we can remember that everything is as sweet as candy you