Sugar is something all moms have in mind. We make sure our children don’t have too much sugar, and even indulge in it ourselves for that late afternoon pick-me-up. Who hasn’t raided their children’s leftover Easter or Halloween candy? Like many moms I ration sweets out to my children on occasion. For them there is a weekly sugar payload at the supermarket. After a trip to the deli, they get a free kid’s club cookie at the bakery, usually a sugar cookie. When the cookies happen to have sprinkles, my daughter declares, “It’s our lucky day!” After check out they also gleefully approach the bank counter and get a lollipop for the ride home. One sugar cookie and one lollipop is well worth getting a weeks worth of groceries in peace.
I also have the secret stash of dum dums for those important times when I really need the girls to, say, pose for a family photo. Yes, bribe candy.
All sweets share the same main ingredient: sugar. But what makes lollipops hard, gum drops soft, and taffy so chewy? I decided to find out.
What is Sugar?
To know candy, one must know sugar. The Science of Cooking website provides a great explanation and diagram:
“The white stuff we know as sugar is sucrose, a molecule composed of 12 atoms of carbon, 22 atoms of hydrogen, and 11 atoms of oxygen (C12H22O11). Like all compounds made from these three elements, sugar is a carbohydrate. It’s found naturally in most plants, but especially in sugarcane and sugar beets—hence their names.
Sucrose is actually two simpler sugars stuck together: fructose and glucose. In recipes, a little bit of acid (for example, some lemon juice or cream of tartar) will cause sucrose to break down into these two components.
If you look closely at dry sugar, you’ll notice it comes in little cubelike shapes. These are sugar crystals, orderly arrangements of sucrose molecules.”
How Does Sugar Become Candy?
Simply speaking, candy is made by dissolving sugar in water, then cooking the sugar solution to a particular temperature until the desired consistency is reached. As the temperature rises, so does the sugar concentration as the water evaporates. A high concentration of sugar will result in a hard candy such as lollipops and brittle, and lower concentrations of sugar cooked at lower temperatures will produce candy such as jellybeans and gumdrops. Here is a little chart to help illustrate the process:
Stage Temperature in °F Sugar concentration
thread 230-233°F 80%
soft ball (e.g., fudge) 234-240°F 85%
firm ball 244-248°F 87%
hard ball 250-266°F 92%
soft crack 270-290°F 95%
hard crack (e.g., toffee) 295-310°F 99%
clear liquid 320°F 100%
brown liquid (caramel) 338°F 100%
burnt sugar 350°F 100%
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy
The “Stage” describes the consistency of the sugar solution when a sample is dropped in cold water, a.k.a. The Cold Water Test. Notice that as the temperature rises, so does the concentration of sugar and the firmness of the resulting candy.
So the answer to my question is quite simple: heat. Various temperatures create various textures of candy. A quick search of candy recipes will reveal other ingredients such as corn syrup and cream of tartar. These ingredients prevent the sugar from crystallizing in recipes such as lollipops, when you want a clear, glass-like candy. Some softer candies, such as toffee, use butter to prevent grainy crystals from forming and help maintain a smooth texture.
Click Here for the recipe for rock candy. This is a great and tasty experiment about saturated solutions.
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