( applause ) >> So how many people were here for Valentines Day? Thanks for coming back.
I guess I didn't put you to sleep. And I hope at that point, you got a bag of candy.
I know we didn't have enough to go around. So we made plenty this time. And of course, that's the way
it goes. At any rate, what I'm going to do tonight is talk about Halloween candy.
And again, we have these demonstration pieces, so please don't eat anything, unless you've got that Tootsie Roll
gone already. But I need that other Tootsie Roll for later. That symbol is going to be your
key that it it's okay to eat the candy that's up on the screen. And I'll walk you through what you're looking for.
And that's part of how we're going to do this is the same way we did the chocolate session. We'll talk about different
candies and some of the characteristics of those candies how they're made, and some of the science behind it.
So, I'm going to turn this into some science, too. That'll be fun. So, what's your favorite
Halloween candy? Go ahead, shout it out. ( inaudible ) Really?
Pumpkins? Orange slices, Snickers bars, caramel... Candy corn, really?
Candy corn is your favorite? It's certainly the characteristic of this holiday is candy corn.
And in fact, that would be the focus of what we do at the end of this section. So I put a lot of these things
in here. Some of them, you'd find in your trick or treat bag. Some of them, you find in your
trick or treat bag here. And there's some surprises maybe some things that you wouldn't normally think about as being
Halloween candy. But typically, candy bars would probably come out as-- When I'm handing it out,
that's what the kids grab is a candy bar, a Snickers bar or something like that. Well, are you guys experts?
( inaudible ) Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don't. Now notice this Web site, if
you're interested it's the Science Museum of Minnesota. They have this wonderful section on cross sections.
They have cross sections of almost anything and you have to guess. So I've pulled a few of them
off. We'll go through a couple of these. ( inaudible )
Milky Way. Everybody buys a Milky Way bar. How about this one? This is like a PhD one.
They're made in Wisconsin.
Yeah, it's 100 Grand. That's inflation. That's okay. ( laughter )
100 Grand bars. These are made by Nestle in their plant in Burlington. A little bit of fudge,
some rice crisp in the chocolate coating. Here's one. So there's a little
mini Snickers bar in there. And what I'd like you to do is to bite it in half. It's mini, so you could pop it,
but bite it in half. And look at the cross section. Try not to smear it with your teeth.
But look at the cross section. So this is the number one popular candy bar and probably for good reason.
So what it's made of, though, is nougat on the bottom layer. So it's that white I don't know, it's kind of a fluffy type of
candy, right? There's a second layer that's caramel with peanuts stuck in there.
And then of course, it's coated in chocolate or enrobed in chocolate, as we like to say. So the way these are made is
there's a strip of nougat that goes down. The conveyors are like 36 inches wide at these plants.
And it's a thin layer of nougat that gets coated with the caramel and the nuts on top of it.
And it gets cut and separated and sliced into the right length of the bar. And then it goes through a
curtain of chocolate to be enrobed in the candy bar. That's how a Snickers bar is made.
So what I want to start with is the general process for making candy. And if you look at a candy
thermometer you can see the kinds of things that we're going to talk about here. But essentially, every candy, if
you look at the label says sugar or corn syrup as the number one and number two ingredients. Sometimes one is first,
sometimes the other. I'll talk about why one is higher than the other and what effect that has.
Essentially, we mix the sugar and corn syrup into water, enough water so that we can dissolve the sugar,
because typically we use granulated sugar. We dissolve the water as we heat it.
But then we cook it. And sometimes we add other ingredients in there. Sometimes these are added after,
sometimes before, it depends on the purpose that we're adding. Things like milk and milk fat for caramels would be added
before, because that enhances the browning reaction, the caramelization reaction. But essentially cooking sugar
syrup is boiling the water off. So we put it under enough heat that the water boils. Of course, sugar has an effect
on the boiling point of water a boiling point elevation effect. As we cook more water off, the boiling point goes up and
actually we follow the boiling temperature and we never measure water content we just measure temperature, because that's easy
to do. And we know how to correlate the temperature that we boil to with the final water content that
we're going to get in our candy. That's critical to the texture, critical to the quality and control of that candy.
It actually determines what kind of candy we're going to make is what temperature we cook it to. It's essentially boiling up
along the boiling point elevation curve. And that's what tells us the water content.
That's targeting the water content for the specific candy. Then we cool it down. We do some things to it, maybe
we aerate it, maybe we crystallize it, of all things. Then we form it into whatever shape we're going to form.
Then cool it and package it. Again, we're going to do some of that here today. You won't see the whole process.
We've already done the boiling. We've already done some of the other addition stuff. Basically, we're just going to
warm it back up and form it into the desired shapes. That'll be at the end. So, this is what you'd find on a
candy thermometer. So as you cook up to higher and higher temperatures, you make a syrup, a sugar matrix that's got
different characteristics. And these terms: thread, soft ball, firm ball and hard ball are determined by
the characteristics of the sugar syrup after you drop it into cold water. So, if you cook it up to 244 and
drop that syrup into cold water, it turns into a ball that's a firm ball, but still pliable, you can move it around, similar
to what we would make with caramel. And so on up to the top here, if you cook it up to 300-some
degrees, you've boiled off enough water so that the final water content is only two or three percent.
And then when you cool it down, it turns into a glass, and we call that hard candy. Here's a video.
I have two videos in this presentation. The first one is-- My students laugh, because we
stand around the candy lab watching sugar boil. And we joke about paint drying, and stuff like that.
But we're watching sugar boil. And this is our lab. And I've dropped sugar syrup that's cooked to 230 degrees
into the water. And look at it. At that point, there's so much water left in the sugar syrup
that the viscosity of that sugar syrup is low enough, that when you put it into the water, it just disperses.
It doesn't have enough integrity to stand up to anything. At 240, now you see streamers starting to form there.
So, it's starting to have enough viscosity that it holds together. I can reach in and pull it out.
And it's soft, so it's a soft ball. So that might be the center of like a cordial cherry, or
something like that. So each candy, again, is cooked to a certain temperature to give us a certain water content, to
give us a certain process. Here's 250, or so, and now the viscosity is higher, because we've boiled off so much more
water, that it's turned into a firm ball. So, it's a firm ball. It stands up to it's own weight,
but I can push it and it's pliable, like a caramel. So this would be about the temperature that we'd cook a
caramel to, depending upon the characteristics of the caramel, would determine whether we'd cook to a higher temperature or
a lower temperature. Now we're up to 260. And when I add the sugar here, now you can see strands form.
So the strands retain their identity of that sugar syrup. However, when I reach in and grab it out, I can still form it
into a ball. But it solidifies into a firm ball or hard ball. This is the hard ball stage.
So, higher cook temperatures lower water content might make candies like marshmallows. Circus peanuts are marshmallows.
Now we're going to 285, so we're pretty high in temperature and you can see those strands are forming and holding their
identity even in the cold water. But when I take it out, I can still move them. They're still somewhat pliable.
So this is the soft crack stage. There aren't too many candies made in this. This is sort of an in between,
but that's the soft crack stage. Now we're up at 305, so this is the highest temperature basically we go when cooking
sugar syrups. Again, firm strands there. And now when I pull them out, they crack.
So this is a glass. We've taken a liquid sugar, boiled all the water off. It's liquid at high
temperatures, but when we cool it in the water, it turns into a glass. That's our candy, is a sugar
glass. We've made it simply by boiling the water off, to that high of a temperature, under controlled
conditions. And then cooling it quickly so the sugar doesn't have time to crystallize.
It turns into a glass. We'll talk more about glasses in a little bit. That's one of the interesting
science parts about candy, about all foods. So here's a summary then, of boiling temperatures and
approximate water contents that are left, and the types of candies that we would make. So, low temperatures, high water
content, syrups. There are a lot of candy syrups out there. Intermediate temperatures for
jellies and marshmallow. 244 or so is where we cook for fondants and creams, a little bit higher for caramels,
depending upon how hard the caramel we want. Up here we would be going to chewies and really firm chewies
at the high end of the temperature range. And then at this temperature range, we're at the two
to four percent, where we form hard candies, or maybe a toffee, or something like that. These are a very low water
content, very hard. So you look at the characteristics of those candies.
And one of the main points to get out of this is as we go to lower water content by cooking to higher temperatures, we make
harder candies. So the characteristics of the candy, related to water content as one of the things.
So here's where what going to do today. We're going to do kind of a series on what I call aerated
candies, so I had to pick. There's hundreds of candies out there, I had to kind of focus to fit this into a 60,
okay, 90-minute talk. So, I'm going to walk through these and talk about some of the important characteristics in
making these, and relate it back to the important textural and scientific parts. And I want to note some of the
people that have helped me here. Some of the candy was donated. Barb at Meister Candies. Meister is in Cambridge,
Wisconsin. They're the number one producer of circus peanuts. They also make salt water taffy
and we have some Halloween taffy from those guys. Gwen is out in Salt Lake City. It's Sweet Candy Company.
They make taffy, so we have some of her taffy. Then Rich Mikler is Vice President of R&D at
Just Born, which is the Peeps company. Then I'd also like to acknowledge my helpers.
I'll do this here. Jeff is a junior in the Department of Food Science. He's taking my candy science
class this semester. He knows his way around the candy lab now. And Rachel is helping me as
well. She's new to the Food Science department, a freshman who just transferred into food science.
Then I'm going to acknowledge Newton as well, and his dad, Tom, who's been helping with organization.
And Tom, especially for driving us over here with all this stuff! It doesn't fit on my bicycle.
Thank, Tom. At any rate, we're going to walk through these candies and talk about some of the interesting
characteristics. So not only is water content important to texture and those properties, but also is the air
content. So I'm going to use this ancient symbol for air. And denote the amount of air in
there by the density. So as we go from marshmallow to taffy, we go up in density. Note that if we cooked a sugar
syrup up to 90% solids, only 10% water left, that sugar syrup would have a density of 1.45 grams per milliliter.
So it's denser than water. Water is about 1. And with all that sugar in there, of course, the density
of the sugar syrup is substantially higher. But now candy, these candies in particular, have air embedded in
them. That air lowers the density of the whole candy. So something like marshmallow
has a density somewhere about a quarter to a half of the density of the sugar syrup that went into making it.
We've added that much more volume of air to lower the density that much. That's one of the factors.
There's two factors here that affect texture. I'll add a couple more factors as we go through this.
Okay, so here's Peeps. And all I could get was this big box of Peeps for each of you. ( laughter )
And I think there's six more boxes out there, or cases of boxes out there. And so if you don't want to eat
it, that's fine. But play with it at least. ( laughter ) One of the food science jokes
is we play with our food and we'll play with yours. ( laughter ) But that's the experience that I
want you to get here, is to experience the food. If you don't want to put it in your mouth and taste it, that's
fine, but at least use your tactile senses and feel it. So Peeps, you think of Easter, right?
But Just Born is trying to sell us on all seasons, so we find ghosts and we have some cocoa cats back in the lab, as well.
At Christmas time, we'll find, I don't know if they make Santas or something like that. Some of you might also have
little ghost marshmallows in your bag, but don't eat these yet. These are for later.
These are also Peeps-- Or Just Born. They're not, I guess they are "Peeps," but they're not the
Peeps that we think of. But don't eat those other marshmallows. Just eat the white ghosts.
So what's in a marshmallow? If you look at the ingredient list, well, it doesn't list air. Companies don't have to list air
on the ingredient list, even though it's the number one ingredient and it's the cheapest ingredient.
The standard joke around the food industry is we'd love to sell you more air, because it's cheap.
And obviously, we'd like to sell it to you at a high margin. But marshmallow is one of those classic ones that the density is
so low that at least, well even if the density of a marshmallow is 0.7, that's still half the volume of the marshmallow
in air. Peeps are probably down around 0.3, or something like that.
So 75%-85% of that volume is air. That's what you're buying and mostly what you're eating.
Again, look at the label. It's probably not real high in calories compared to other candies.
Then on the ingredient list, undoubtedly the first one is sugar and the second one is corn syrup.
Because those are the main ingredients that we put in candies. Question?
( inaudible ) There are certain corn syrups you can just say "corn syrup," but if you have high fructose
corn syrup, you have to say high fructose. But there are different types of corn syrups and you can just say
"corn syrup." Some of them you have to label, because of consumer concerns. This one is a standard 42DE corn
syrup, whatever that means. But it's just a standard corn syrup that's used widely in the candy industry.
In the candy industry, we hardly use high fructose. It has the wrong properties for what we're interested in, mostly
because fructose is really hyrdroscopic and it gets sticky. So we don't like putting fructose in our candies if we
don't have to. So the corn syrup that we have is just a basic corn syrup. It might be something like this.
It's sort of like a Karo syrup, but that's a commercial grade that's got some other things in it.
This is just corn starch that's been broken down into glucose polymers. And the "D-E" represents how far
it's been broken down. So for those of you that want it, the D-E stand for dextrose equivalent.
It's the equivalent glucose reducing end, as we break down the starch molecule, the starch polymer.
And so the difference in how far we break down the starch molecule, this is one that's not broken down very far, so it's
really thick and viscous. And a 62DE corn syrup is one where now we've broken down the starch molecule into a lot more
smaller molecules. And so it's much less viscous. You have much less viscous, right?
So it's still pretty thick and viscous, but not this bad. It's starting to move, but it's pretty thick and viscous.
So that's corn syrup, probably the number one or number two ingredient that we find. And then in marshmallow, the
next ingredient often is gelatin, which comes from collagen, which is naturally found connecting tissues in
muscle, or hooves, or bones, and things like that. So it's a naturally found protein that we allow to break
down under temperature and acid conditions into a protein that has very specific characteristics of being very
gummy. So gummy bears, the main component of gummy bears that give gummy bears their texture
is gelatin. It's what's in Jell-O. Gummy bears, Jell-O and marshmallows are the main
application for gelatin. So what it does in gelatin is actually coats the surface of the air bubbles and holds them
in place. Then when you pull that marshmallow apart, it gives that elastic characteristic to it.
Then of course, colors and flavors, because as Tom says, we buy food for the taste and the appearance.
So not only the flavor but the color, and they have to match. In my freshman class, I make orange slices that have a grape
flavor. ( laughter ) Jeff's shaking his head because there are some students
in class that, "How could you make this?" Missing the point. You're looking for orange,
you're tasting grape. That's a disconnect and it's not so good. So that's what's in
marshmallows. Oh, marshmallow processing. I have another video here that comes from a company that makes
equipment for making marshmallow. There's two ways of making marshmallow.
Again, first we cook up the sugar syrup to a high temperature. That's done in tanks, so the
first part of this is-- You know what? I have it set up so I can control it, sort of.
I'm going to run the video from here because then I can control it. It's about seven minutes long,
and most of it is just looking at stainless steel. ( laughter ) Some engineers get excited by
that, but I don't. ( laughter ) In the food industry, we use stainless steel as our base
material, because it's sanitary. And we would never use regular steel, because you can't clean it, so the good thing about
stainless is you can make it sanitary. That's why we use stainless. In fact, there's different
grades of stainless that have different properties. So here's all the stainless steel.
Basically, that was the cooker and the pumps that bring it over to the depositor. And essentially, this is an
extruded marshmallow. So the Jet Puff marshmallows are just extruded out of a pump or shooter.
Then they're cut off. This is the marshmallow feed lines into an extruder head. There is an extruder spitting
out marshmallow. This is a European marshmallow. We don't find these in the U.S. The Europeans like marshmallow
much better than we do. They make these funny colored, multi-twirled marshmallows that are really nice looking.
So this is the extruder head. There's the extruder head. There's the extruder dye with marshmallow being pressed out
into this form. So it's got one here, this twist, which we'll see. Here's the twist form.
And so it's a three-head extruder that rotates. And it makes these twisted strands of different
marshmallows as it comes out. And so this is a production line of marshmallow. Again, it's a European version.
What we're going to do now-- Yeah, look in the distance! ( laughter ) So it takes some time for the
marshmallow to set. And gelatin is a really interesting material. It's a thermo-reversible gel.
So you heat it up above its melting point and it turns liquid. You cool it below its melting
point and it turns into a gel. And you can go back and forth, and back and forth. So we deposit that.
We extrude it and put it out into the form when the gelatin is melted. Then in that cooling tunnel,
that long conveyor is where the system cools and the gelatin sets into the marshmallow. They've got it controlled just
right so it doesn't flatten out. Now they've put some more corn starch on the top of it because marshmallow is really sticky.
And so we protect it with corn starch. That's what you on the outside of a Jet Puff marshmallow, is
corn starch, because it's sticky otherwise. Here's the cutting machine, to cut those ropes of marshmallow
into little bits. Then it goes on to a conveyor and taken over for packaging. This is an extruded marshmallow
line that, again, a pretty common type of operation. Let's move ahead, because-- Oh, I'm sorry.
Here we're getting rid of the corn starch now. So, there's extra corn starch on there.
We've just dumped a whole lot of it on there. Now we're getting rid of it in a tumbler.
There's a screen in there to let the starch go through. And of course, the marshmallow pieces are too big to go
through, so we collect them in a conveyor. And those will now be taken off to get packaged.
So that's the processing line for making these fancy marshmallow twirls. We can also deposit
marshmallows. So there's two ways. One is the extrusion process. We can also deposit
marshmallows. The marshmallows you have in front of you are deposited in a form something similar to this.
Tom, could you get me a bag of candy? Thanks.
So here we have a depositing head. This is a series of pumps and pistons in the top here.
They're just showing the operation of the depositing head coming down. It's going to deposit a plop of
marshmallow here in just a second. Now it's got marshmallow in it. They were just showing the
operation first. Now it's got marshmallow in it. It's the XZ Depositor, X-Z, as opposed to Y.
And it's depositing a plop of marshmallow here. Didn't it say it could deposit with things inside of it?
So you have, in your bag, a marshmallow eye. ( laughs ) And this is a deposited
marshmallow with a liquid center. So again, if you don't want to eat it, just bite into it and
look at the liquid center and see how they do it. But they've done it in this process where the marshmallow
comes on the outside and then there's a co-depositing head where the liquid jelly center goes into the middle.
They co-deposit it at the same time. A lot of candies are now being made with this single shot
depositing head. Those Hershey's Kisses with the stuff inside it? Single shot depositing.
So there's chocolate outside and a whatever, caramel or cherry center inside, depositing it in. So again, we're depositing a
plop of marshmallow with something inside it. This one happens to get flattened a little bit.
I think most of the color is on the bag. My eyes are bloodshot, too. Not on the bag.
So again, here we're going to put the corn starch on the top to protect it from being sticky. And I hate these "easy open"
bags that are hard to open. ( laughs ) When I do this in class, I have to get students to come up and
do it for me. So this is a plain marshmallow with some kind of jelly center inside, made in exactly this
way.
( inaudible ) I'm not sure. But it's probably 30 or 40 feet. The time required for it to set
is on the order of minutes, the way they set it up. But it's moving along. Of course, companies are
interested in the bottom line, which means more and more of this coming off the line in one minute.
So how fast that conveyor runs is really critical to the bottom line. I don't know why that one's
so long, but it is long. Again, that was a European facility. I've never seen it.
( inaudible ) Oh, it gets re-used. The corn starch will get re-used.
So it gets dried out, cleaned up, sieved again, then re-used. Corn starch is a big part of the candy industry and I have a
demonstration of that here, too. All the corn starch, as much of it as possible is re-used. Here's how those familiar shapes
are made. So it's a depositing head. But the depositing head comes down, moves over and then swirls
it up. You wind up with this little characteristic beak for the marshmallow Peeps.
So it's done in this process, but it's got that little fancy thing. It's just built into the
machine. It does that automatically. When they first started, it was probably somebody with a bag,
you know, a piping bag. And they just did it and phfft, there was a Peep. But it's all automated now.
So if you haven't eaten them all, take one of those ghosts and pull it apart. I only happen to have a Peep
example for my slide. Notice I carefully held it by the head with the beak still up. ( laughter )
I pulled it apart because I was interested what was inside it. And so I want you to do that, too.
Can you see air bubbles in there? Sort of. They're pretty small.
It's really hard to see. But what you could see if you could look at it would be in my graphical depiction, are these
air bubbles surrounded by a sugar corn syrup matrix that's amorphous filled. I'll explain amorphous in just a
minute. If we look closer at two bubbles, what surrounds those bubbles and keeps them from
coalescing together-- These two bubbles would love to come together and form one bigger bubble,
but they can't because the gelatin is in the way. The gelatin coats the surface of those bubbles and keeps them
from coalescing. But it also give it that stretchy characteristic. It's what gives it the elastic
character. And actually, if you look at it under an electron microscope, what you see are cavities
where the air was, and then this amorphous sugar matrix surrounding it. But this magnification, you
can't see gelatin molecules. You need a much higher magnification for microscopy to be able to see molecules.
But at any rate, this is the structure of that marshmallow. That's where the gelatin comes in.
You could not make marshmallow without gelatin. So what is amorphous? I have a few things here to
demonstrate viscosity. This is high fructose corn syrup, by the way. High fructose corn syrup.
It's basically a liquid that finds it's own level very, very quickly. So it's thicker than milk, but
thinner than honey. So a fairly low viscosity liquid. If I, again, increase the size
of the molecules that I have in here-- High fructose corn syrup is made up of fructose and glucose.
Those are the main molecules. Two small monosaccharides, very small, 180 molecular weight. This is made with glucose
polymers, the corn starch that's broken down into polymers. So the average molecular weight of this, 62DE, is about, I don't
know, 300 and something. Do you remember? The molecular weight of 63DE? ( inaudible )
( laughs ) It was on one of our tests. ( laughter ) One of our labs, right?
They had to use it in one of our labs. But it's higher than sucrose. It's a higher molecular weight
than sucrose. And so, it has about 20% water, too, so it has some fluidity. But it's much thicker.
This is that 36DE corn syrup, which has an average molecular weight, and I say average because there are some glucose
molecules, but there's some really long glucose polymers as well. So the average molecular weight
is somewhere in the 500s, I think. Somewhere around 500. It's pretty high compared to
sucrose, compared to glucose and fructose. That gives it a viscosity so that it's amorphous.
Question? ( inaudible ) No, it's not thickening. It's not time dependent.
Corn syrups are -- which means that no matter what I do to it, how long I shear it, when I look at it, it still has
the same viscosity. Chocolate, on the other hand, is something that does have a shear thinning behavior.
Tomato ketchup has a shear thinning behavior. But not corn syrup. But this is amorphous.
It's got some solid-like characteristics. It's slowly moving. It's amorphous.
Amorphous simply means random structures. And typically, we think of that as being randomly structured and
thick. Like fruit leather is an amorphous material. What would happen if I increased
the viscosity of this even more? Well we all know, you saw the video. We'd make hard candy.
Exactly right. We'd make hard candy. So this is a sugar syrup that has a viscosity
above ten to the 14th-- So it's viscosity is so high that it's turned into a glass. It's exactly the same as silica
glass. If you heat silica glass up to whatever temperature, hundreds of degrees-C, it becomes liquid.
It doesn't melt. Because the molecules in here are just the same as the molecules in liquid, they're
randomly oriented. They're not crystalline in nature. They're just randomly oriented.
So as we heat it up, the molecules just get more energy and become more liquid. So this glass and window glass
is really just a super-cooled, thick viscous liquid. And so somewhere between this glassy state and this
semi-flowing state, is what's in marshmallow. That's the matrix that's holding those air bubbles together, is
some thick liquid sugar syrup. Because there's still 20% water in that liquid. But it's so thick, and it's held
by the gelatin, that it keeps the structure of that marshmallow. So with that, we can do an
experiment. I'm going to try something here. I did this in class yesterday, too.
This is my dewar of liquid nitrogen. Oh, it doesn't unscrew, does it? It's a dewar of liquid nitrogen.
( inaudible ) Sure, if anybody wants to come down and watch, that's fine. But I'm just going to pour some
liquid nitrogen out of here, then I'll hold it up. Liquid nitrogen is liquid. And I can, if I get rid of the
wires, pour it into my beaker here.
Everybody has probably played with liquid nitrogen in some form or another, right?
So we're going to pour some liquid nitrogen into here, so you can see it's just a liquid. And as long as it's cold,
it stays as a liquid. But as soon as you warm it up, it turns into a vapor. It turns into a gas.
And as it's doing that, it cools things. So I'm going to take one of these peeps and sacrifice it.
( laughs ) So there's a really neat Web site here. Some people have way too much
time on their hands. ( laughter ) Must be college kids! ( laughs )
Not my students! So basically what we're doing is dunking the Peep into liquid nitrogen.
And we're taking that amorphous sugar state and cooling it down so that it's a glass. That's what we're doing, is
turning that sugar matrix into a glass. Of course, it changes the texture.
So if I take an unfrozen version of it and hit it with my mallet, the tools of science, it doesn't do anything, right?
It's just flexible. It's gummy. It's jelly. It doesn't do anything.
You all know what's going to happen with this, right? Because everybody has dunked something into liquid nitrogen
at some point in their lives, or at least seen it done. So it's already pretty hard. And of course, the fun part is
hitting it with the mallet and turning it into shatters. I told you, Tom, that I was going to make a mess!
( laughter ) It's cold. It turns it into a solid material that is glassy in
nature and then is brittle so that when you hit it with a mallet, it shatters, just like it did right there.
That was a great experiment. So again, what we've done was change the temperature. So the glass transition
temperature of the marshmallow was still the same, but we lowered its temperature to a point below its glass transition
temperature. So the matrix turned into a glass. As opposed to driving off water
to make it so viscous that it turned into a glass, here we just cooled it down below a certain temperature.
Here's a friend of mine who studies candy, too. And she did this study on marshmallow texture and varied
the water content, and measured that glass transition temperature. For perspective, the glass
transition temperature of a good hard candy is about 40 degrees Centigrade. It's about 120 Fahrenheit.
So that's high room temperature, warm outside temperatures. So, hard candies always, this hard candy, almost always are
glass, because outside temperature is lower than the glass transition temperature of this.
Except for maybe Jolly Ranchers, which have a glass transition temperature of just above room temperature, which makes
them very hygroscopic, and that's why you have to peel the wrapper off. But we're going to change the
water content. That's going to change the glass transition temperature. These are never going to be
glassy, because the glass transition temperature is always still below room temperature. But I lowered the temperature
below the glass transition temperature by dunking it into the liquid nitrogen, thereby turning that amorphous matrix
into a glass, allowing me to whack it. She did that by changing water content.
And again, never got the water content low enough to turn it into a glass, but turned the hardness up by three orders of
magnitude. So by controlling water content, or not controlling water content, if Peeps get hard over
time, that's why they get hard. Sorry, I changed my slide. So that's why these get hard, is over time, the moisture
content of the Peep dries out. The Peep dries out over time, it loses moisture and it gets harder because that glass
transition temperature is moving closer to room temperature and the viscosity of that continuous matrix, the sugar matrix that
holds the bubbles together, is getting higher and higher. That's what causes Peeps to get hard.
Some of you maybe like petrified Peeps, I don't know. Some people like to buy Peeps, open the bag and let it sit for
a week before they eat it. And what they're doing is driving the water content in this way, making it get harder.
But what they're really doing is changing the glass transition temperature that makes it get hard.
I told you there was a little science going on. Okay, so that's marshmallow texture.
That's all I'm going to talk about that. Moving on to the next one. Anybody guess this one?
A little bit more complicated. Very good. Extra points! A Mars bar.
I bring it up because my next candy is nougat, the center of this. Nougat.
What is nougat? Well, where did it come from, first. Actually, the French and the
Italians fight about it. So the French think that it's Montelimar, that's the classic nougat, which was made initially
with honey, egg white and almond. Honey is the sweetener, egg white as the stabilizer
to hold the air bubbles together and almond to give it some flavor. The Cremona nougat is very
popular, as well, but it's basically the same kind of ingredients. Here's an interesting story
about Aunt Manon and how, perhaps, the name nougat came about. "Tu nous gates"
means "you spoil us." And she gave this candy sweet. So some people think that's
where the name nougat came from. And if in fact, you're from France, you would never say "NEW-guht" because that's so
American. You would have to say "NEW-gah." So, you spoil us.
That's the theory, or at least the idea. Did you have a question? ( inaudible )
In French? Bon-bon. I think. Actually, bon-bon, this is what
my daughter tells me, she studies French. Bon-bon is the word for candy. But "bon" is good.
Good-good. I always get a kick out of that. So, what are nougats, right? Nougats vary from here to there.
And not only is water content and air content a concern, but so also is the state of the sugar, not just in the
glassy state, now, it's rare to find sugar in nougat in the glassy state. But we can find it crystalline.
And so, there are some nougats that are grained. We call that a short nougat, because it has a short texture.
We'll get into that here in just a bit, is how crystals give a different texture to the nougats.
Hang on a second. We'll get into both of these in a minute, but we're not quite there yet.
So, how do we make nougat? That's basically the same process as making candy. We mix sugars, cook it to the
appropriate water content, cool it a little bit. Then we add the stabilizer, because these are proteins.
If we heat them too high, they unfold, and they will no longer have their properties. Then we whip to inject air,
or do something like that. In nougats, typically, we'd add fat. But fat and air don't like each
other. The fat goes to the air surface and keeps it from forming bubbles.
And so, we whip it first and then we kind of fold in some fat afterwards so it doesn't drop the aeration, along with the
nuts and fruits. Then we can form it either through extrusion process or molding, not depositing, but
molding it. I'll show you an example of that here in a bit. So that's how we make nougat.
Now I want you to try that Three Musketeers. So what's in a Three Musketeers? The ingredient list says sugar
and corn syrup. Sugar is the first ingredient. That tells us that sugar is a higher concentration than corn
syrup. We use corn syrup to control the crystallization of the sugar, of the sucrose.
And so, if we have a higher sugar content than corn syrup content, we're controlling it, but it's still prone to
crystallization. In fact, in a Three Musketeers nougat, we want it to crystallize.
It's a grained nougat. It has a short texture. Short texture means bite it and break it apart, and it just
breaks clean. So the stretch between your fingers is short. It's a short texture.
We'll compare that to Charleston Chew, which you can already think about going out like this, right?
So it's not a short texture, it's a long texture. So it's got sugar and corn syrup.
From that we can tell it's likely to be grained. Some fat in there, cocoa powder for flavor.
A little bit salt. And egg whites is what's stabilizes the air source. So it's not gelatin in this
case, it's egg whites. That gives a different texture. It's not as jelly-like. It's not as elastic.
It's not an elastic protein, like gelatin. It's just a stabilizing protein. And then it breaks up.
It doesn't hold the stretch. And then of course, artificial and natural flavors. It's also got air.
It's not as aerated as the Peep, but it's more aerated than a taffy or something like that. So it's in between.
So those are the ingredients. If you look in the structure here, here's what the crystals look like.
So this is on an optical microscope with cross polarizers, so we can actually see crystals from the background
as they refract light. These are very small sugar crystals, small enough that you can't feel them in your mouth.
And that's what's giving that short texture. Those sugar crystals are breaking up any corn syrup
and protein matrix so that they're just kind of in the way, and they can't form this stretchy matrix.
So when you bite it, it just pulls apart as a clean, short break. Why are they Three Musketeers?
Good. ( inaudible ) Very good. That's exactly right.
So back when they first came out in 1932, we got three flavors. It was sort of a Neapolitan Musketeer.
I don't know, I found that wartime restrictions on vanilla and strawberry caused them to go with just chocolate.
I don't know why chocolate, but that's okay with me, I like it. Now let's look at the Charleston Chew.
So bite into that and pull it apart. Again, we're looking for the difference in stretch and
texture that you get from a Charleston Chew compared to the grained nougat. This has no crystals in it.
Corn syrup is the number one ingredient, meaning that there's not enough sucrose in there for it to crystallize.
Otherwise, it's basically the same product. It's got vegetable oil. It's got milk protein and egg
proteins, so it's changing texture a little bit. It's a little bit more elastic, but no where near marshmallow
elastic. It's got soy protein in there, as well, and some other artificial colors and flavors,
and citric acid, as well. So it has a very different texture. It's the kind that lasts in your
mouth for a long time. It's really chewy. And it's got a long texture. Again, you can pull it and
stretch it, and it takes a long time before it breaks in half, before the strand breaks. So the sugar crystals in the
Three Musketeers are what caused that short texture. These don't have sugar crystals. And so, it has long a texture.
However, when you look at it under the microscope, you get these weird things in there. So there are a couple crystals
in there and a couple kind of amorphous particles that are in there that I don't know where they come from.
But it's not surprising that there's periodic sugar crystals in there because there's still enough sugar that possibly,
under the right conditions, it might crystallize. But there's not enough in there to cause that short texture.
So we think of it as being ungrained, chewy type of nougat. So what factors affect nougat texture?
I'm going to summarize and add a couple things. One is water content. Lower water content,
harder nougat. The sugar crystallization changes the texture, as well. So the grained nougats are
softer and less chewy, because their sugar crystals are breaking up that structure and allowing it to bite clean.
But here we add fat. The fat also has an effect on texture. It is added to decrease
stickiness and increase the lubricity in your mouth. So it's actually added for two reasons.
One is for taste, so that when you bite into it-- ( popping noise ) Actually, we also do
Dippin' Dots in my lab, which is basically pouring ice cream mix into liquid nitrogen. And I need a better design of an
insulated container, because that container shot out about six inches. So, we'll see if it blows.
That'll be fun! ( laughter ) You're far enough away. So, fat content.
It's added to increase lubricity as you bite it, so it doesn't stick to your teeth as much. It's still pretty sticky, but it
could be worse. And also for processing. So these materials are sent through these high-speed
processing and packaging lines, and if the nougat is too sticky, it sticks to the package, it doesn't package very well.
Companies get all upset. Vice Presidents get fired for stuff like that. And then air content again.
Typically, higher air means it's less hard. And you can see that sort of with marshmallows.
With the Three Musketeers, we mix two factors, so it's hard to see that completely. But that's the trend.
And this comes from a friend of mine at Penn State who also studies candies. And he was looking at, this is
related to hardness. So it's a hardness modulus, if you will. It's a function of the density,
which is how many air bubbles you've got there, right? And so, as you go from a small amount of air bubbles and higher
density to a lot of air bubbles, then these bubbles kind of interact with each other. But it that's amount of
continuous matrix that gives you this high increase in hardness. So the fact that we've got all of this continuous matrix at the
high densities means that the product is much harder. So not only water content, not only graining, sugar
crystallization, but also the air content in just the nougat system changes the hardness of that material as well.
Again, these are all things that a candy maker has at his disposal. We can make things, target it
certain ways to make a candy with the right attributes, or certain attributes that we're looking for.
Okay, so now we're moving on. Fruit chews. We've got two more candies to do.
We should be in good time. We're going to do fruit chews next. And here's a list, well a
scattering of types of fruit chews that we find, from Laffy Taffy to Starburst. Here's Laffy Taffy.
And this one is in your bag, so go ahead and pull that Laffy Taffy out. And bite into it and pull it
away. You can tell me whether it's grained or ungrained even though I've got the answer up here
because corn syrup is the number one ingredient. So, you wouldn't expect there to be sugar crystals present in
this system. The way you're going to eat it and pull it, you know it's not grained.
It's got the same chewy texture, even more chewy texture than Charleston Chew. Part of that is density.
Part of that is water content. So Laffy Taffy also has palm oil, so it's got some fat in there for the lubricity part.
Some organic acid for flavorings. This one has mono- and diglycerides, which are
surfactants. So they're molecules that like water and like fat. These actually bridge the gap
between the fat globule and the water aqueous phase that surrounds it. So this is the first one that
we've had that has a surfactant. And lecithin is another surfactant, so they've really-- It must come from the way they
make it, that if they don't have surfactant in there, that they get a separation of the oil from the water phase.
So that's Laffy Taffy. It's aerated, but not a lot. It's certainly no where near the grained nougat we had or the
marshmallow that we had. And what's missing from this list? There's no protein.
No gelatin. No egg whites. No protein. Don't need it to stabilize the
air cells. The viscosity of this is so high, the viscosity of the continuous phase, the amorphous
phase, is so high, it keeps the air bubble from coalescing. So we don't need it in this case.
And it does give it a slightly different texture, right? But it's still chewy. So fruit chews have a very chewy
texture, low water content, relatively low level of aeration and no graining. Here's an interesting quote.
This comes from Noda-san, who also works in my lab. He's retired from-- He's a funny guy.
He retired from Adams brands. They make gum, as well as chewy candies. I can't think of the brand of
chewy candies. But that's what he worked on in his life. He retired from Adams brands,
which is in New Jersey and moved to Kona to retire. He's obviously Japanese, so he's moving halfway home.
And after a few years in Kona, he decided that he missed winter. ( laughter )
So he moved here to Madison to work with me. And so he plays around. But he teaches our course on
fruit chews. The guy is amazingly funny. And I can't do it justice, but he says, "Chewy candy
steals my teeth..." So we need that fat to lubricate it so it doesn't steal his teeth.
He's talking about fillings coming out. So very funny guy. Tootsie Roll, another one that's
in the bag. Now I'm comparing something that's very similar in ingredients.
It's got sugar and corn syrup. Sugar is the number one ingredient, corn syrup is the number two.
So it's grained. What do you think the texture is going to be compared to the Laffy Taffy?
A little bit shorter, maybe. So bite into it and pull it away, and see what you think. How does that compare?
Oh, yeah. So the sugar crystals are in there, breaking up that texture a little bit.
So they play with how much sugar crystals are in there to control how short it is. So they want it to be chewy, and
they don't want it to be too short, but they don't want it to be too sticky, either. By playing with the ratio here,
the graining factor, if you will, they can control how much sugar crystallization occurs. And then again same set of
ingredients. There's condensed skim milk, but that's partially for flavor, rather than for stabilizing the
air. Because it's not really whipped very much. It's a very low over-run or
high-density type of candy. Whey also has proteins in it, but, that's not the reason. And lecithin is there to bridge
with the oil. Let's go to this question first. ( inaudible ) Every candy company in the food
industry is working to get rid of partial hydrogenation. I'm not sure what the label on the Tootsie Roll says.
But the regulation is that if you have less than a half a gram of saturated fat or trans fats per serving, you don't have to
label it. You can label it as zero. And I don't know where they come out on that.
Because partially hydrogenated soybean oil may only contain 25% trans fat. And if they added a certain
level, and in the whole mix, it may turn out that the amount of trans fats per serving still comes out to less than half a
gram. I don't know the answer for Tootsie Roll. It would be on the label.
But all companies are trying to replace it. However, what's interesting though, is that, you know, we're
playing to the regulations. The regulations are if you have less than half a gram per serving, you can label it at
zero. If you're interested, ask me about trans fats later, because there's a reason that we have
them. ( inaudible ) It makes a cheaper formulation. Sorry, but that's how companies
save money nowadays, is they replace more expensive ingredients. And condensed skim milk is an
expensive ingredient. If you can replace some of that with whey, which is what's left over after making cheese, which
has been a byproduct over the years, so it's really cheap. If you can replace some of that with whey, you can make a
cheaper product and still charge more. So it's a cost savings. So here's the sugar crystals in
Tootsie Roll. They're really small. And they have this kind of needle shape to them, as well.
I think that has to do with how they form and grow, and the effect of corn syrup on how the sugar crystals grow.
But essentially, they're really small. They're aren't a lot of them in there.
I don't know the percentage. It may be less than 10% graining factor in there. But it's enough to change the
texture, to shorten it, compared to the Charleston Chew and the Laffy Taffy. So let's go to taffy.
I'm sorry, now we have two candies left. So we're going to talk a little bit about taffy.
And I'll go through it quick. But first, we call it salt water taffy. Does anybody know the reason for
this? ( inaudible ) He knows! The story is that somebody was
making a taffy-like product. A storm blew in. The salt water got into their candy.
And so this young girl comes asking for taffy, and he says, "Take some of this salt water taffy."
You know, it's no good anymore. And of course, it turned into a big seaside industry.
So that's how salt water taffy came about. Sometimes the recipes call for salt water or salt in there, but
you've seen salt in some of the other recipes, too. There's nothing magic about it. But it's okay, it tastes good.
You have pumpkin face taffy in your bag. This comes from Salt Lake City, which actually is a hub for salt
water taffy, not surprisingly. ( laughter ) First ingredient is corn syrup. Then sugar.
So we suspect that it's not grained. You also can now understand that texture is because it's not
grained. So it's got a chewy texture. It stretches a bit. It's aerated to some extent.
And it's got vegetable oil, but egg whites as well. This one does have salt in it as well.
And the egg whites are now back in there to help stabilize the air bubbles and give it some of that--
It's a little bit gummier and more elastic than some of the other products we have. But it's also got a little bit
of vegetable oil in there as well. This one's a pumpkin face taffy. I'll talk a little bit about how
they put a pumpkin face on there in just a second. So here's the typical process. It would be to mix the
ingredients, cook them up to the right water content. Then cool it down. Now we're going to put air into
it using a pulling machine. So taffy pulling is an old-time favorite, right? Then it would cool a little bit
further, go through some kind of forming device. This is a forming device, but I'll talk more about this later.
Then it would go to the cut and wrap machine, where the twist wrapper would be put on it, as the same time it was being cut.
But I'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit. So, pulling can be pulling between two people, extra points
if you guess him. Noda-san pulling taffy with somebody else in the lab. Or pulling it on a hook.
And he's amazing with the hook. I mean, you know, it's a hook, so it hangs off the wall like this.
And he throws that candy slab and goes like this, and just pulls it, and throws it up and pulls it.
He's got the right twist and hand motion. And Jeff and I are going... ( laughter )
And then it falls down here. Thanks. It is more fun that way. It's fun to watch him do it,
though. And he really pulls it, so he's got it pulled down to here from up here, so he's got it six or
seven feet pulled, and then twists it and ropes it back over and pull it down again. What we're doing is folding air
into it. So it's a way of aerating, putting the air bubbles into it by folding, and re-folding, and
folding, and re-folding. So make a surface and then put it back over. And as you do that, you're
adding more air into it. We aerate. Lower the density of the taffy by pulling.
This is a pulling machine. We have one of these in our lab, as well. It's an arm-breaking device.
There's three rotating levers that go around on an axis, like this. And you're supposed to put the
candy mass over it, get it to weave over like that. And it kind of weaves it like this, by itself.
Of course, if you get your hand in there, it's not good. So this one, no self-respecting candy company would use
something like this any more, because it's such a safety hazard. So they're either now
horizontal, so the three pins go this way. And then it has a cover over it, so you can't turn it on unless
your hands are out of there. There's a cover over it or they put a screen over that. Question?
( inaudible ) Yeah, we still have one in our lab, too. I'm scared of it.
I don't let my students touch that. We have one or two guys that can do it.
That's it. ( inaudible ) Good question. When do they put the faces on?
There's a little guy with paint! ( inaudible ) That's exactly right. They go all the way through.
So how do they do that? I'll get to that in just a minute. So here's an electron microscope
image of taffy. You can see the bubbles here, and that continuous candy matrix, again.
It's an amorphous matrix, very similar now back to some of the marshmallow we looked at. And then again, the egg protein
is there, holding the bubbles together. So, very similar to marshmallow. But not quite as aerated.
And aerated in a different way, as well. Okay, so now, how do we make peanut butter kisses?
This is exactly the same question as the pumpkin face. The pumpkin face as the black specks all the way through, the
mouth, nose and two eyes that go all the way through that piece. And actually, your piece and your neighbor's piece probably
came right off the same candy, and were cut so that it had that shape in the middle. And so these peanut butter
kisses, which are another traditional Halloween candy, have a peanut butter center down the middle of it.
It's made by taking the taffy and rolling the peanut butter center inside of it. So you can imagine taking a slab
of taffy, smearing some peanut butter in the center of it, and then folding it over, like that. Then you've got a sausage,
right? So you've got a big cylinder, a sausage, with peanut butter in the middle.
Or if you're really clever, you can block different shapes inside there. You can put a black strip here,
a black strip there, a black bloop here, and a black nose down the middle, and block it with orange, and make a sausage
with a shape in the middle of it. Then you just take that sausage and pull it out.
You turn it into a thin rope, that's about the size of your taffy. That's done on one of these
machines. These are batch rollers. The big sausage would fit in here.
These are tapered rollers that roll back and forth and squeeze out that sausage down into a skinny rope, like this, with
peanut butter in the middle. I'm not a real good artist with my processing stuff here, but basically it's a skinny rope
of the size of your taffy, with a strip of something down the middle, in this case, peanut butter down the middle.
And that would get cut and wrapped in the cut and wrap machine as we've done other taffy before.
That's how those centers get put into it. You can put almost any shape into it by cleverly blocking the
different colors. If you go over to Babcock Hall, you can buy hard candy that's made in exactly the same way,
with a running "W" in the middle of it, and "UW-Madison" underneath there. That's made by blocking.
Imagine making a sausage of hard candy, with different stripes of colors that spell those words. That's what they do, so it's a
very artistic craft type of thing. Then they take that sausage, pull it out.
It's done in exactly the same process here. Then it goes into a forming machine.
It's cut and wrapped the same way as taffy is done. So we can make hard candy. In fact, hard candy, we call
that cut rock. I don't know if that term rings a bell, or not, but you can find cut rock with flags inside, and
roses inside, and all kinds of shapes in there. When we teach our class in the summertime, what did we make
last year, Jeff? We made flags? Butterflies, sorry. So every year, they do something
different. Some craftsmen from Chicago come up and do our hard candy cut rock.
And this year, they made a butterfly. Last year, they made crossed American flags.
Then the rose is really popular. They can do almost anything. So when you buy taffy, it can have just a simple shape inside
there, or it can have a pumpkin face. You can make all kinds of faces by appropriately blocking the
color and then pulling it into a rope. Okay, so now the last candy. Candy corn.
And it's demo time, as well. Candy corn is called mallow cream, because it's a combination of cream and
marshmallow. We don't call it marshmallow, we call it frappe. It's a fancy term.
And this is frappe, so it's really light. But it's basically a marshmallow that's--
Don't eat it yet! The sign's not up there! ( laughter ) So this is frappe, and I will
pass this around. You're welcome to open it and poke at it, but don't eat it, because somebody else has poked
it before you, and you don't know where their finger's been. So, you can poke it, but as soon as somebody pokes it,
it's no longer sanitary, so don't eat it. But it's basically marshmallow that's stabilized, what did we
put in here? Oh, this was ready-made frappe. I think it was either soy protein or a combination of soy
protein and gelatin. The second ingredient for making candy corn is fondant. This is just a highly
crystallized sugar matrix. We use it to make creams, things like the center of a York peppermint patty.
Raspberry creams in a chocolate coated surface would be made with fondant. But this is the base.
We'd also use it to grain fudge. So if you're at a fudge shop, often you would just throw in some of this and it would grain
it. You wouldn't have to mix it. You just throw in fondant and it seeds for crystallinity.
You're welcome to poke at this, too, and play with it a little bit. It's an interesting material.
Oh yeah, what is the flavor of candy corn? Don't answer that, I'll tell you at the end.
Here's the ingredient list for candy corn. There's sugar and then corn syrup.
So what else? It's candy. It's a sugar candy. But sugar comes first, then corn
syrup, so you suspect that it's grained. Not surprisingly, because we're going to use fondant as our base
for making candy corn. Fondant is about 50% crystalline sugar. We're going to keep some of
those crystals there, as well. Then there's salt. Honey, that's a flavor, right? But that's not the
characteristic flavor. Nobody would've said honey as the flavor of candy corn, because that's not the
characteristic flavor. Soy protein, gelatin, again. So that's in the frappe. That's a marshmallow held
together in the same way, by protein, the same way marshmallow is. Ooh, confectioner's glaze.
That's an interesting term. Dextrose is just sugar. There's artificial flavor. Titanium dioxide is what puts
the white on the color here. So it's a natural mineral that is allowed at small levels in foods.
It gives a very white color because of its particles. Then other artificial colors. We're going to make candy corn
here in just a bit. But we have a different color for the orange. In tribute of Wisconsin being
the cheese state, we've made a nacho cheese color. So to make candy corn, first we make fondant and frappe.
That's what I'm passing around. We happen to have supplies of this. We get fondant in a 40-pound
cube. So somebody else makes it. We just buy it. We don't buy it, we just get it
from them. They give us a 40-pound cube of it. This frappe is a Fondax type of
frappe. Companies send us stuff, because we do it in our classes. So we warm the fondant and thin
it with a "bob" syrup. Bob is just a sugar syrup made of sugar and corn syrup. And it just dilutes the fondant
to soften it up a little bit. So what we have going in our skillets over here is some cream.
That's where we've added the fondant. We've thinned it with bob syrup. We folded in the frappe and
added the colors and flavors at the same time. Then what we're going to do is deposit it into a starch mold
and allow it to set over night. So let's do it. So my team here is going to make candy corn.
We'll see how this works. We did it in candy class a couple weeks ago. And it was a marginal success.
( laughter ) So what we have here is a tray that looks like this. This is called a starch tray,
not surprisingly. This is the industrial size, as well. So the smallest size, the only
size is the commercial size. We're going to fill this with corn starch, and level that corn starch off.
I don't know how well you can see that. We filled this with a bed of corn starch.
Corn starch, the white powder. Just corn starch. And then leveled it off. What we're going to do is make
holes in it, depression in it, and then fill those holes with cream. Of course, we want to make sure
the holes have the right shape. So you know, Jelly Belly has been making candy corn for over 100 years.
Jelly Belly was one of the first companies to make candy corn. So it's simply, take this print board and make a depression into
the corn starch. The corn starch has a little bit of mineral oil added to it, so it holds the shape.
It doesn't just flow across. So it's simply a matter of pressing. And this is all done
mechanically by a starch mogul, which I'll get into in a second. And basically just making a row of depressions in the corn
starch that is where we're going to deposit the cream. I just want to make enough rows here that we can show you how
it's done. Okay, so it would be done like that. However, commercially, all of
these would be put on a single board. These would be stacked up, screwed down on a board.
And in one big machine, this thing would come along and make all the depressions in that single board.
Then this board would ratchet over to the next level in the conveyor, and another board would take its place.
That print board would come down and make another one. The next one in the line is the depositors.
And here are our depositors. You guys ready? So what happens with the corn starch?
The corn starch, when we deposit the candies in here, like we're going to see that taking place, then these starch boards with
the candy centers in there, go overnight in the warm room and get held to allow the cream to set.
It dries out a little bit, too, because the water in the cream penetrates into the starch. Starch is a good water
absorption device. So it picks up some of the water out of the candy corn. It helps it set and dry.
Then the next day, we would take this board. Actually, we put this board back onto the starch mogul.
On the front end, the starch mogul would carry it through. An arm would take it up, tip it over, shake it out onto a
screen. The candy corn would be collected on the screen. The starch would to through.
The starch would get carried over into a dryer. First it would be sieved to make sure there were no bits left in
there. Then it would go into a dryer to take the water that just came out of the candy corn into it.
Then it goes into a dryer and back into the other side of the starch mogul, and used over. ( loud crashing noise )
It's okay. ( laughter ) I love it! Yeah, my students don't like it,
but there is nothing wrong. You have the what? Okay, a little too much, Jeff. So we're depositing.
And I don't know how well you can see it, but if you need to stand up and look at it. We're depositing a tip--
Here's my screen saver, by the way. ( laughter ) So we're depositing a tip
of white. What do I have next? So we're depositing a tip of white into it.
Then Newton's going to come along with orange and deposit over the top of that. Then Rachel's going to come over
with the yellow and deposit over the top of that. So in a starch mogul system, we would, again, fill the tray with
corn starch, press the board with the depressions, then the depositor would fill the molds. In this case, there'd be three
depositors, with three different colors, sequenced so that the white is set just enough so that when you poured the orange on
top of the that it molded together. The next one would be the yellow bottom.
So there'd be three sequential deposits. I have to have three people do it, but it would all be done in
a single piece of equipment, a starch mogul. Then these trays, again, would be collected.
They're collected on this racking system. It's all automatic, even the taking the carts over to the
storage room and then bringing them back the next day. It's all automatic. It just feeds the machine,
un-turns them, takes the candy over for the rest of the process, and so on. So these starch moguls make like
hundreds of thousands of pounds of candy a day. Doing that. ( laughter )
Supposedly in the 1880s, when this was developed in Philadelphia by some candy maker, and when they did it
first, it was a very labor intensive process. As you can see, it's a very delicate balance.
( inaudible ) Isn't that like bumps on a ski slope? I don't know where it comes in
this meaning. There are other meanings for the word. And how it turned into this
machine, I have no idea. I mean, we think of moguls as being the bumps on ski slopes. But also, these powerful bank
brokers or business brokers, right, are moguls? ( inaudible ) Probably only four or five.
So there's Brach's. Jelly Belly makes some, though I've never seen them. Sather's & Farley
now makes candy corn. Oh, Sweet Candy out in Utah. They make candy corn as well. So there might be a bunch of
small companies that make it. When we go to the grocery store, we're probably buying Brach's, for the most part, which is now
owned by Sather's & Farley. Candy companies keep merging and buying. ( inaudible )
So what do you use to make sugarless candies? I took that out of my talk. Sugarless candies are made with
an ingredient called a sugar alcohol. So it's a sugar molecule that's been hydrogenated to
have an alcohol group. So it's really an alcohol chemically. So it's similar to, so like
sorbitol is glucose that's been hydrogenated. So it's just chemically changed by one hydroxyl group.
That's all. And it has much different characteristics than the glucose from which it came.
Namely, it has a much lower calorie content. And it doesn't have the same effect on our blood sugar, so it
doesn't give us the same insulin response. That's why it's for diabetics. It also has a real strong
laxative effect. So most of those sugar alcohols, if you're eating sugar-free candies or sugar-free
anything, be careful. It says that it has a strong laxative effect, and it does. ( inaudible )
Yes. ( inaudible ) No, people have made, I mean, nougat's been around for a very
long time. But it was made with honey, which contains some of the compositional ingredients.
So the break down of starch and starch hydrolysis is not that new. It's probably 150 years.
Probably commercial corn syrup has been around 100 years, somewhere like that. And before that, people knew how
to break sucrose down into its individual molecules. So some of the old-time candies used tartaric acid to actually
break down sucrose into glucose and fructose. They have some of the similar properties as corn syrup, not
quite. Again, that fructose is problematic because it can be sticky and be hygroscopic.
So the candy industry has really grown with the development of corn syrups. Interestingly, in the world,
we're the only ones that call them corn syrups. Everybody else calls them glucose syrups, representative
of the fact that they don't necessarily come from corn. In Europe, it's potato starch or wheat starch that's used as the
main supply of glucose syrups, not corn. It's just the U.S. that makes corn.
The world is now moving towards calling it all glucose syrup, regardless of the origin. Okay, you guys can quit now.
( laughter ) They're on a roll! They got it figured out! It is kind of fun.
We won't be able to eat these until tomorrow. And even then, I'm not sure we want to!
( laughter ) No, I'm sure they're wonderful. So, what is the flavor of candy corn?
We'll get there. So other things that are made in starch moguls. A lot of the gummies and jellies
are made by depositing in starch. Even fondants can be, so chocolate covered cherries are
made by depositing the fondant into starch. Circus peanuts, marshmallows, caramel, fudge, all of these
things can be made by that process, depositing into starch. It's a really, really powerful process, because you can re-use
it. You can form any shape. Very, very quickly, you can change over from one candy shape
to another candy shape. So, it's a very, even though it's messy, it's still a very highly-used process and
technology. There's the flavor. Butter and vanilla. Would you have picked that out?
Maybe in hindsight, you can pick those out. But butter and vanilla, even though it doesn't say it on the
label of the Brach's candy corn. It says honey. Again, you don't get a honey flavor out of it.
You get a butter-vanilla flavor out of it. So that must be commercially made with artificial flavors.
They don't have to declare it. We put in real butter and real vanilla. ( inaudible )
Yes, so jelly beans would be a starch gel and then coated with a sugar candy. I'll finish with--
Oh, sorry. ( inaudible ) Probably not. I don't know how they're named.
They're so rare that I don't know how they're named. They're coated with chocolate, right?
They're chocolate-coated with a liqueur center. I'm not sure how they're made. I mean, there's a number of ways
to make chocolate-coated things. I'm not sure which one they use. That could be the topic for next year.
And samples, please. By the way, if anybody's interested, the food science club is putting on a truffle
workshop some time in December. It'll be $10 or $15. You get to take home two dozen truffles.
They're doing a money-making event. Question? ( inaudible )
So typically, highest quality candies use butter. If you're making a gourmet caramel, you wouldn't use
anything but butter. But if you look at most caramels, the commercial caramels that you buy in the
grocery store, they're using vegetable oils, because of the cost. It's all due to cost savings.
We could make a lot of things of really high quality, but many of us don't buy those. So some people like to buy, or
maybe can only afford to buy relatively inexpensive goods. So there are manufacturers that cater to that.
And there are manufacturers that cater to the high end as well. ( inaudible ) I don't think so.
I think they're going to make them with cream. So my guess is that they'll make really good truffles.
Not my guess. I know they will make really good truffles. Actually, they won't make them.
They'll make you guys make them. If you're interested, look for the announcement. I'm not sure how we'll get the
word out. We haven't even really thought about it, but we're going to limit enrollment to 25, because
that's all we can handle in our lab. But if you're interested, that's fine.
And I guess my closing part here is looking both ways through the candy store window. What I've tried to do is give
you some of this guy's side, looking out. This is my son, and this is my daughter in Provincetown.
This was a really funny event. I didn't keep it here, but I was in there watching this guy make fudge.
Actually, he's the assistant and the guy who was making fudge, I was standing there at the door, right here where Eric is, just
inside the door watching him make fudge. And he had no idea who I was. I was just some vacationer,
tourist. Not that I know candy science. He looks over to me and says-- He's trying to teach him
something. He looks over to me and says, "It's not rocket science." And my answer is,
"Nope, it's candy science." ( laughter ) My students are tired of hearing that story, but it's a classic
character story. Then you have some gratuitous candy left in your bag. ( applause )
( inaudible ) Moth balls? Snow balls? They're candies?
( inaudible ) I've never heard of them. Is it a Midwest thing? ( inaudible )
I haven't seen them. ( inaudible ) If anybody's interested in talking more, come on down.
Of if you want to look at our candy corn deposits, come on down.