What's Your Favorite Candy?

[jmowreader]

40. Two kinds, really...

If I'm not feeling super motivated, Ghirardelli squares.

If I AM feeling super motivated, the hard candy I make myself. It is both very easy and very dangerous. Here's the recipe.

Ingredients:
2 cups granulated sugar
3/4 cup corn syrup - get non-foodservice Karo, it has no HFCS in it and all the others do
1 one-dram bottle of Lorann Candy Oil flavoring
Gel food coloring in whatever compliments the flavor
Nonstick cooking spray
Powdered sugar

You MUST use these flavors and colors - regular baking extracts and liquid food coloring won't survive the heat.

Equipment:
For almost all flavors:
Hard candy funnel - this is in two pieces, a funnel and a rod with a ball on the end which serves as a valve
Silicone spatula
Candy thermometer
Hard candy molds - they are white, DO NOT USE CHOCOLATE MOLDS FROM WILTON FOR THIS BECAUSE THEY WILL MELT!!!! I usually need six sheets of molds to handle one batch

If you are stupid enough to try making mint or cinnamon flavors
Army surplus gas mask with good filters

My recipe differs somewhat from the one everyone else uses in a couple of ways, and I'll explain why in a second. The "official" recipe calls for 1 cup of water; you stir the corn syrup into the water, heat it up then start adding sugar.

My version omits the water. You simply measure the corn syrup into a pot, heat it until it's as thin as water, then melt your sugar into it.

Once all the sugar is in, start stirring it until it boils. Once it starts to boil, it's self-stirring and you can just sit there scraping down the sides of the pan because the hot mess will throw sugar crystals off; if you don't get them back into the syrup and melted they will give you grainy candy.

In either case, your mixture will undergo a phase transformation at somewhere around 210 degrees F, where it will become a "boiling liquid." If you put no water in your candy, the transformation is a nice orderly affair; at 205 degrees F it'll be a nice runny hot liquid and at 210 it'll start bubbling. If you put water in it, when this crap hits 210 it will immediately attempt to boil over no matter how big your pot is and it will keep on doing that until you reach 220F. So leave the water out, m'kay?

Once the candy gets into a nice boil, you no longer need to stir it as it'll do that all by itself. Stick a candy thermometer in it and scrape down the sides of the pan. (The best way to scrape the sides of the pan is to stick the end of your silicone spatula into the boiling candy then kinda make an arcing motion up and down the side of the pan. Try it and it'll make sense to you.)

While the candy is boiling and you're scraping, put on this wonderful and quite appropriate educational film and spray your molds with a little nonstick spray, then wipe them out with a paper towel. You'll be up to temp by the time it's over.

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Eventually the candy will reach 260 degrees. Add some color. The motion of the candy as it boils will stir it in for you. Then pick up your bottle of flavor and...

Anything but mint or cinnamon: pour the whole bottle in. It contains less than a teaspoon of flavoring and it'll be plenty.

Mints or cinnamon: don your Army gas mask and add HALF - no more - of the bottle to the candy. I am not shitting about the gas mask either; the fumes coming off a five-pound batch of mint candy would have been enough to clear Ammon Bundy's friends out of Malheur. (I have no idea how anyone survives a stint in a candy cane factory...for some reason, I doubt the M17A1 is NSF-approved.)

The other change I make is to target temperature. Most recipes will tell you to take the syrup to 310F - "hard crack" stage. I very rarely do that; sugar begins to caramelize at 300F, so you wind up with a brown candy. Keep this in mind if you're making a flavor that should be brown, like chocolate or root beer. For every other flavor, 285F - "soft crack" gives you a candy that's still hard but is much prettier to look at.

Spray your funnel and the valve rod with non-stick spray. Put it in a coffee cup and pour in your candy. Then fill each little indentation in your molds one-by-one. Once they're full, just let them cool down.

Get either a container with a lid or a gallon-size ziploc bag, and put a cup or so of powdered sugar in it. Unmold your candy into said container and shake it around to coat the candy with powdered sugar - this sops up any oil on the candy's surface. Then dump candy, sugar and all into a sieve and shake gently to get most of the sugar off.