Want Some Candy Little Girl?

I made chocolate caramels for holiday gifts yesterday. They turned out delicious; chewy and chocolaty, with hints of butter and rum, and the sea salt I sprinkled on top. This was my first batch of caramels. Well, to tell the truth, they were my second batch, the first batch was more like rock hard caramels that could pull fillings out without even trying, so I don’t count them.
I’m not sure what I did wrong the first time (although I knew things weren’t going well when I dropped my digital thermometer into the boiling hot sugar and had to guess at the temperature after that). I used a different recipe this time although the ingredients were basically the same. My new recipe had me bring the sugar mixture up to a certain temperature then add another ingredient, reheat, add more stuff and heat again. Maybe it was raising and lowering the temperature that made them turn out so delicious. Maybe it was more accurate temperature monitoring. Maybe it was just dumb luck.
Candy-making has always been a bit intimidating to me (and I’m someone who doesn’t get intimidated in the kitchen very often). It’s one of the few types of cooking that doesn’t have any wiggle room. If you cook a roast to 130F instead of 125F, you will still have a delicious piece of meat to serve; it will just be a bit more done. If you try making marshmallows and only heat the sugar to 235F instead of 240F, you will end up with a bowl of very sweet, very sticky soup (I know, I’ve done it). Candy making also seems like the kind of endeavor where you could seriously hurt yourself. Pouring boiling hot sugar that can reach 300F from one pan to another is a scary proposition.
But candy is fun and making it yourself is even more fun, so intimidation be damned. I just needed to get in there and get a few sugar burns. After one failed marshmallow experience (and a few successful ones) and a 50% failure rate on caramels, I figured it was time to learn what was actually happening on a molecular level with all that hot sugar. I turned to the one book where I knew I would find the answers, “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee.
It turns out that simple white table sugar isn’t so simple. Sucrose (what we know as table sugar) is a composite molecule of glucose (the most simple of sugars and the one from which all living cells extract energy) and fructose. Sucrose has properties that make it especially useful to candy making. Unlike glucose and fructose and other sugars, it has a pleasant taste in high concentrations. It is readily soluble in water, and it is the most viscous of any sugar and water solution.
Sugars are also very resilient molecules. They don’t easily break apart with heat or get damaged by oxidation like fats and they don’t coagulate or denature like proteins. Instead, they mix easily with water, tolerate high heat, and like to form into beautiful crystal structures.
When sugar molecules do begin to break apart at high heat, the odorless, colorless, simply sweet sugar begins to form hundreds of new and exciting compounds with aromas of butter and rum and fruit and colors of deep brown and caramel. In fact, the caramelization of sugar (heating it to the point when its molecules break apart) is where the flavor we know as caramel comes from.
I’d always thought that candy making had something to do with the molecular structure of sugar at different temperatures. I was wrong. Those resilient little sucrose molecules stay the same throughout most of the candy making temperature ranges and don’t begin to caramelize until 340F.
So what’s going on at those immutable temperatures in all those candy recipes? It turns out candy making is foremost about sugar concentration. Because raising the amount of sugar in water raises the boiling point of the water in a consistent way, those temperatures are the easiest way to measure the sugar concentration of a syrup. It is much easier than the way they used to do it before thermometers. Back in the 17th century, cooks would stick their finger in the boiling hot syrup, touch their thumb to the hot goop, pull their digits apart and see what structure resulted. Ouch!
Different consistencies of candy result from different sugar concentrations. Soft candies such as fudge and fondants are made at lower temperatures and lower concentrations. Chewier candies like caramel and marshmallows need somewhat higher concentrations and hard candies need to be almost 100% concentrations of sugar.
The other really important part of candy making is controlling how the sugar crystallizes as it cools (so I wasn’t completely wrong in thinking there was something happening at a molecular level; the molecules themselves don’t change, they just line up differently). Mr. McGee informs me that this is the trickiest part of candy making (and here I was all worried about temperature). If the sugar mixture forms a few large crystals, the texture will be coarse and grainy. If there are millions of tiny crystals and those are separated by just the right amount of uncrystallized syrup then the resulting candy will be smooth and creamy. If no crystals are allowed to form, you get sugar glass and hard candies.
Crystal formation is influenced by the rate of cooling (quick cooling results in fewer crystals), how much movement is introduced into the syrup (lots of stirring results in lots of tiny crystals and smooth creamy fudge and caramels), and whether any foreign particles or crystallized bits of sugar get into the mix (get one of those crystals from the side of your pan in the mix and you’re done for). Plus adding corn syrup helps slow crystallization down to a manageable level.
How does all this newfound chemistry knowledge help guarantee perfect caramels from here on out? I now know that the temperature isn’t as exact as I thought it was. I could raise the temperature anywhere from 240F to 250F and still have a chewy candy in the end. All that cream I added made the candy thick and rich and it was actually the lactose sugars that caramelized and created those buttery, caramel flavors. And all that stirring (even if it was a bit tedious and made my hand hurt) paid off in the tiny crystal structure and the resultant smooth creamy mouth feel. Plus I’m feeling so unintimidated, I might have to try my hand at fondants and hard candy next.

The One That Worked
(Chocolate Caramels from The All New Fannie Farmer Cookbook)

Weigh into a 6 qt heavy bottomed pan
10 oz. light corn syrup
4 oz. honey
1 lb sugar
4 oz. unsweetened chocolate

Add
¼ t. salt
1c. heavy cream

Cook over medium high heat, stirring constantly until a candy thermometer 244F (an instant read thermometer works but it’s not as convenient). Remove from heat. Add

1c. heavy cream

Cook again, stirring constantly, until the temperature reaches 236F. Add

1T. butter

Cook again, stirring constantly, until the temperature reaches 242F. Add
1t. vanilla

Pour into a buttered 8”x8” pan. Sprinkle with sea salt if you want. Allow to cool. Cut into bite-sized pieces and wrap individually in small squares of waxed paper.