Sugary Failure

The picture you see above shows what happens when your candy recipe fails. This happened over the weekend at Fire Island while I was trying to make peanut brittle. I have made this recipe many times before and never had the sugar crystallize during cooking. So, after cleaning up the gigantic mess I made, I proceeded to try to investigate what went wrong.
One thing about the World Wide Web is that people rarely use it to discuss their own failures. If you Google "candy recipe failure" you will receive only one posting related to how a candy recipe doesn't work, and that one is mine. Nevertheless, with a little searching, I was able to find an excellent review on the variables and tricks in candy making on the website Baking911. The display on the site is a little busy for my taste, but it has excellent information. There is a more concise explanation (in fact I am sure one site lifted their facts from the other!) at Exploratorium.

Humidity, a fact of life on Fire Island, is the likely reason that my candy recrystallized on me. Since it would be difficult to wait for a dryer day, I looked to see what steps I could use to get me a decent batch of brittle.

Interfering agents are things that stop crystallization from occuring. Combining two sugars helps prevent crystallization because the sugars can't lock together as well. "Inverting" table sugar by adding acid, such as cream of tartar or lemon juice helps break down sucrose to glucose and fructose. For soft candies, such as caramel, cooked at lower temperatures, fatty things such as milk or butter also help reduce crystallization. My prior experience tells me this will not work for hard candies, as the milk or butter solids burn at higher temperatures.

I remade the batch, modifying my original recipe as follows:

HUMID BRITTLE RECIPE!

• 4 cups sugar



• 1 cup corn syrup



• half of a squeezed lemon



• 1/2 cup water

This solution boiled to 325 degrees without a problem. I then added lightly salted peanuts and the brittle was formed. My one note is that using a combination of sugars did seem to give a minimally more chewy result, although this may just be my imagination

Don't Boil Molasses when Making Candy

Not quite that bad, but close. I was attempting to make an almond brittle with a salty, smoky taste and I decided to try to add molasses to the sugar and even to corn syrup and sugar mix. The results, after severak attempts, are painful to look at and even worse to clean up. At about 250 degrees or so, the mix, even with only a small amount of molasses, started to boil over and foam. Interestingly, this did not happen when I used maple syrup in a similar way. Adding a small amount of molasses after heating the sugar does work, and you still get a hard, tasty candy. More on this later. I tried to research why molasses foams so much when heated above this temperature but no one seems to have tried. In traditional "Internet echo syndrome" everyone repeats the same ancient "molasses candy" recipe which conveniently does not give a temperature to heat the molasses to but rather says to "boil it" etc. One recipe did give a temperature, but my candy was already boiling to a foamy mess at the 260 degrees they recommended for their recipe. At 290 or so (the softball stage) it was burnt.

Failure at Caramel Apples

I screwed up the caramel apples. Now, I don't really think I screwed them up, I think the recipe stinks. It is from Epicurious.com, which usually has good recipes. Not this time. Although the caramel is somewhat tasty, it is to soft to stay on the apples and most fell off. There is a little warning that they give you about that, complete with this rather benign looking picture of someone pushing caramel back onto the apples (those fingers are from epicurious.com). Its a lot of sticky pushing for a dozen apples. Even Male Martha has better things to do (in this case, go to the Ranger's game). The good news is that all of the leftover caramel sits in a greased bowl and will be an excellent topping for ice cream.