Halloween sweets come in different textures

AS YOU’RE sifting

through your Halloween

bounty this year, consider all

the forms candy can come

in. Some will be smooth

and chewy, such as caramel.

You’ll surely have some

gummy animals in the mix,

along with a rainbow of lollipops.

All of these desserts can

be made with the same main

ingredient: sugar. It’s through

the wonders of chemistry that

confectioners make the sweet

stuff take so many different

forms. “Basically, candy

making is about controlling

the size and shape of sugar crystals,”

says Alton Brown, creator

of the TV shows Good

Eats and Good Eats: Reloaded.

Each grain of table is sugar a crystal – a tidy

structure made of molecules

called sucrose. Units of

sucrose like to stick to their

neighbours, which keeps each

little chunk in a neat shape.

But when sugar

gets wet, some of those

bits of sucrose want to

attach to water molecules

instead. This makes them lose

their crystal structure and dissolve. water Hot

can dissolve more than sugar

cold water, so a cooked-u p syrup will start

to form crystals as soon

as it cools back down. That’s how

many sweets are made.

Candy texture is

determined by the size and

number of sugar crystals, which

chefs can control by the

speed and method they use

to cool that sweet syrup down.

The biggest crystals

make rock candy: You

can do this at home by dropping

a string or stick into a glass

of sugar syrup and letting

it cool down slowly – by sitting

at room temperature, undisturbed,

for days. With no movement

to keep sucrose molecules

from clustering together,

the sugar will form bunches

of giant crystals on the string

or stick over time.

On the other end

of the sweet spectrum

are confections with no crystals

at all. Glass candy – such as

a lollipop

– is made by cooling

syrup down so fast that

sucrose molecules clump

together randomly instead

of forming the usual crystal

structure. Adding gelatin

during that process produces

gummies and marshmallows.

Cotton candy is made up of tiny

threads of this glass, which machines

create by heating sugar

and then shooting it through

tiny holes as it cools. Chewy, fudgy treats

are somewhere in the

middle: You want crystals to

form, but you want lots of tiny

ones instead of a few giant,

rock-candystyle chunks. Chefs

achieve this by gently cooling

their sweet syrup while also

stirring it continuously.

“I think that in

general, people don’t really

realize how much texture

affects our perception of taste

when it comes to candy,”

Brown says. “Honestly, whether

it’s fudge, brittle, toffee, taffy…

texture is probably about

70% of what we’re sensing when

we enjoy it.” – Washington

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