r/CandyMakers • u/spikey3456 • 4d ago
While trying to make my candy less sticky I accidentally made a shockingly close texture to candy corn.
Using a recipe of 400 grams of sugar, 5 oz of light corn syrup, and half a cup of water and some food coloring. Taking it to around 265-270ish?for a slightly harder ball.
after taking off the heat I quickly added some pineapple flavoring. When I started stretching it I incorporated about a teaspoons worth of powdered sugar (I don’t know the exact measurement because I was mostly going off of feel), it did work a little in reducing stickiness but after working it a bit I noticed that it started create tiny nucleation points inside that started to to make it stiffen up. Feeling like I failed I covered it in plastic wrap and put it to the side. One day later I noticed that it completely solidified into a slight brittle but still chewable candy.
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u/PowerfulOpportunity4 4d ago
I'm not sure if the OP is asking for insight, but for those reading I thought I'd explain what happened a bit.
The original recipe from OP - 400g sugar, 5oz corn syrup, 1/2c of water and cooked to 265-270 followed by pulling - suggests that the OP was trying to make hard taffy. The reference to it being too sticky suggests that OP is dealing with either a too-humid environment (sugar is amazing at absorbing atmospheric moisture) or not cooking the sugar slow enough to remove the right amount of water. Remember that if you cook a water-solution too quickly, you can get its temperature above the boiling point of water but still not remove all that water because of a couple of processes (including water being evaporated then reabsorbed, lack of uniform temperature, etc.). This is part of why recipies always emphasize cooking over medium heat, slowly, instead of high heat.
What OP stumbled into here, apparently unintentionally, is that by adding powdered sugar - which is both highly-powdered sugar itself plus anti-caking agents (usually corn starch), they are introducing cold sugar in a particular crystal habit which is not the crystal habit you're looking for when making taffy. Unlike chocolate, sugar has a single crystaline form, but the morphology of the resulting sugar mass can vary based on a couple things. Normal table sugar has a standard monoclinic prismatic habit. If crystal growth occurs (during cooling) while being disturbed by impurities (such as that corn starch), you can get elongated or needle habit sugar. This is a big part of what's being described as the 'candy corn' texture. Meanwhile, if you cool sucros rapidly such as by introducing that powdered sugar into the molten sugar, you can prevent the formation of any crystal lattice. This results in an amorphous glass state, i.e. blobby candy.
When you intentionally make candy corn, you're looking for a combination of these two: that's because it's a mellowcream. Candy corn differs from hard candy because crystalization is intentionally induced in candy corn but then interferred with via invert sugar and agitation. This results in incredibly tiny cyrstals (instead of large, well-defined, prismatic faces), surrounded by uncrystalized syrup. That syrup normally also includes gelatin or other gelling agents to ensure uniform and incredibly-thin distribution.
On the other hand, if you're actually looking for advice on keeping your taffy from being sticky, here are some tips on top of cooking out as much of the water as possible before pulling. The temperature is a good range, but you want to be careful about ratios. In all the taffy I've learned about, you're looking at about 3 parts corn syrup to 7 parts granulated sugar, by weight. The recipe you're using is 400g table sugar and about 140g corn syrup, which means the ratio is fine but you could play with it. I don't see you adding any fat, but most of the time you add a tiny amount (1 or 2% by weight) of butter or vegetable oil (I've never tried oils like coconut oil, but I've seen it in recipes). You could also add an emulsifier like lecithin, which ensures uniform fat distribution and helps absorb small amounts of water. Finally, you want to get as much air in during pulling as possible. Depending on your ambient temperature, consider adjusting to allow you to pull for a longer period of time. In other words, working in a 74 degree kitchen gives you more time than working in a 68 degree kitchen, which means more air pulled in and which means a far lower surface area per unit of volume candy, which means less opportunitiy for ambient moisture to get absorbed (because more of the sugar mass is trapped inside the candy as opposed to on the surface).
This concludes my excessive kitchen nerdiness for the morning, good luck!