Candy-making as chemistry: W&J students’ sweet and not-so-sweet experiences
Junior art major Julia Price stirs ingredients for a caramel mixture. Price and class partner Xiuzhen Tan made chocolate salted caramels during the candy-making class. The candy-making class is an intersession course that helps students fulfill a science requirement.
After a few weeks of making specific candies for their class, the students had the opportunity to create their favorite candies during the last week of class. The candies will then be taste-tested, and the final product will have an effect on their grades.
Freshly made sponge candy is poured into a cake pan to cool during the candy-making class. The students in professor Patricia Brletic’s class spent several weeks perfecting their candy-making abilities to earn a credit and fulfill a science requirement.
Classmates Lexi Keller and Ahleigha Carter-Croom work together to make peanut butter cups during their candy-making class. The class requires students to make a variety of candies like rock candy, sponge candy and lolipops.
Washington & Jefferson College students may not have returned from their holiday break with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, but a group of them probably could have learned to craft just about anything sugary this month in a laboratory of the Swanson Science Center as they learned the chemistry of candy making.
“Cooking is chemistry,” said professor Patricia Brletic, who came up with the idea for the intersession course for those who are majoring in subjects other than chemistry but who need to fulfill a science requirement. Food chemistry isn’t a cake course. The students learned about the Maillard Reaction, which relates to edibles turning a pleasing golden brown; complex molecular structures; and how sucrose is different from glucose and fructose.
After all, a recipe is really a scientific formula. And applying heat, whether in an oven or stove top, changes the structure of components.
Even a simple task, like trying to melt chocolate, can have its challenges. Too high a temperature will ruin it. The condition is known as “seizing,” and it creates a pasty glop that is impossible to drip over clusters of nuts or raisins.
Ever wonder how a praline differs from a caramel? A praline base is sugar with no protein, while caramel contains sugar with protein from dairy ingredients, Brletic explained. An attempt at making caramel candy results in caramel sauce? The sugar solution likely did not reach the optimum cooking temperature.
Why does failed fudge flake? The desired candy is a creamy mixture with a velvety grains of sugar. One team achieved fudgy perfection in an experimental round without relying on a stopgap tub of marshmallow creme. Texture, consistency, chocolately taste, vanilla flavor and appearance were all factors that evaluators from the W&J community were to take into account at a competition on the final day of intersession.
Last Tuesday, Veronica Aboujaoudé, 20, of Gilford, N.H., and Brianne Alban, a sophomore from Collegeville, Montgomery County, were starting to make divinity by adding a step that home cooks would likely skip.
They were, after all, in a laboratory, so they first calibrated their thermometer, making sure it measured the boiling point of water at exactly 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Their recipe required 260 degrees. Using a properly-calibrated thermometer is more reliable than placing a dab of the treat in water to find out if it’s at the soft ball, hard ball, soft crack or hard crack stage.
They began heating sugar, corn syrup and water in saucepan while beating egg whites, first with a whisk, then a hand mixer, in a bowl. Betty Crocker calls for nuts in her divinity recipe, but the students had a package of Oreos they were ready to crush to add some texture to the soft candy.
Aboujaoudé, a business major with an entrepreneurship minor, and she hopes someday “to open something with baking and candy.” She’s found baking is the more forgiving of the two crafts, and that in candy-making from scratch, one must be precise. “I would actually say candy making is harder than baking because the temperature is so specific and candy is really easy to burn,” she said.
The college candy makers learned from their mistakes.
The students’ first attempt at producing the candy also known as sea foam was less than divine. Aboujaoudé poured the first batch down the drain.
“We didn’t cook the sugar long enough so it didn’t harden enough,” she said, starting on a second batch.
Armed with a handmade heart-shaped red box spangled with silver glitter, Travis Clark and Jessi Price of Scenery Hill had never heard of a Buffalo, N.Y., specialty known as sponge candy. The texture isn’t even spongy, but its appearance has just as many tiny holes as a sponge.
“It’s more like a honeycomb, but there’s no honey in it,” said Clark, no relation to the Clark bar. Baking soda and vinegar cause the hot syrup to bubble up, creating air pockets in the hot puff, which collapses somewhat as it cools. After trimming the crisp crust, he and Price planned to score the brittle into chunks and dip the pieces in melted chocolate.
Asked if there’s a dish he particularly likes to whip up in the kitchen, Clark, 20, an accounting major from East Liverpool, Ohio, named something that more people might associate with western New York: Buffalo chicken dip.
Matt Altieri, 21, a senior from Houston, and Doug Johnson, also 21, of Greensburg, are both business administration majors. They completed a previous experiment, so for them, Tuesday was more of a lark.
Less is more when it comes to adding food coloring to their version of the Tootsie Pop, Altieri and Johnson learned. They produced a lemonade-flavored hard candy for the lollipop’s shell, but when they squirted in an entire vial of blue food coloring, their pops appeared black instead of blue or, the color they expected, green. Some serious tongue-darkening would surely take place at the taste test.
The sweet aromas from sugar bubbling away on an electric burner and molten chocolate cooking in the lab enticed two chemistry majors, Marshall Forney, 22, of Avella, and Gia Nigro, 21, of Canfield, Ohio. They nipped in to stir up a couple of batches of taffy, one banana-flavored and the other, maple. Unlike the ebony-colored pops, the color of their candy lightened dramatically as Forney and Brletic kneaded in the flavoring oil and food coloring and stretched the mass of syrupy stickiness into a pliable taffy with the proper chewy consistency.
While Forney is gravitating toward a health-related profession, Nigro plans on pursuing a graduate degree, not in butterscotch, but in Scotch whisky in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she intends to seek a master’s degree in brewing and distilling.
If candy making has chemistry at its heart, then fermentation does, too. The combination sounds like Ogden Nash’s oft-repeated bit of doggerel, “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.”