Willy Wonka Better Watch Out
In science we had made it a goal of ours to use the kitchen we had been given in the lab. After a long break from our first cooking experiment, we decided our next cooking session would be with candy, which we could tie in with our chemistry studies. We started by looking up sugar aliases (of which there are many), and learning about the stages of sugar during the cooking process. Then we split up into groups based on what we wanted to make. I worked with Tobin and Sydney, and we all decided on taffy as our final product. After looking up recipes we settled on the abc news website, as we thought it could be a reliable source.We were the last group to cook, and all of the burnt sugar that had gone before us had me worried about what ours might turn out like, especially sine we had another step the other groups didn’t do, which was stretching the candy.
It was a long and painful process waiting for the candy thermometer to hit 275, sugar boiling only being slightly more entertaining than watching paint dry. Finally though we were able to take it off the stove, add the flavoring and coloring, let it cool, and then start to stretch our taffy. Let me say I have a new found respect for any candy makers. We had to deal with the mixture before it had fully cooled, since we let it cook too long. It had gone from the stage we needed it to be in into a hard candy form, so we had to start pulling it before it lost its malleability, and dealing with the burning taffy was a little difficult. The stretching got tougher the more you pulled the candy, but as it cooled it became more fun. After we were done, we laid out the strips and cut them up. Yes they ended up being hard candy, but both the butterscotch and apple flavors turned out tasting fine.
As far as the recipe goes, I would give it a positive review with just a few adjustments.
1) Cook mixture in a deeper pot for more even cooking, and take it off the stove at least 10 degrees before the 275 mark.
2) Add more flavoring. You could double (maybe even tripple depending on the strength of the flavor your using) the amount that’s called for. With the apple taffy as an example, the butter in the recipe over rode its flavoring a bit.
3) I would suggest putting the mixture from the pot onto a large piece of wax paper once the butter, flavoring, and color has been added. Make sure that it spreads out to be nice and flat, so that it’s easily peeled off when you need to start pulling, and spares you from scraping the remnants the candy will leave behind off a bowl.
4) When stretching, be sure to use bigger chunks of you mixture, and do not over stretch. If you pull it to thin the taffy may harden and or snap.
All in all I think my group was pleased with the results we got though, and made for excellent bragging rights.
