Gummy Slabs
I’ve learned that sugar is a difficult material to make candy out of. Depending on what you’re making (carmel, jelly, gummy, lollipop, etc.,) you must boil it to a very certain temperature for each one. Boil your sugar too hot, and you’ve ruined your lollipop. Boil it too low, and your lollipop won’t be hard.
In science class last week, I decided to try to make some gummy bears with John and Sofia. Seemed simple enough.
As Sofia, John and I started looking for recipes, we noticed that none of them actually called for boiling sugar (which was our goal for the class). All of the recipes that we found called for gelatin and flavoring.
But we pushed them aside and kept looking—until we found the recipe we were looking for. It had us boil sugar, and lots of it.
The only problem was that it was unverified. It was just a forum post. Nothing told us where it had come from or if it would actually work.
But we used it anyway. And as we were cooking, we made one mistake: we added the pectin to the sugar reached 260°F, instead of after. But we did not overheat the sugar.
And because we didn’t actually have bear molds, we just poured the gummy mixture onto a pan, as a slab.
When the gummy slab was done, it was clear that there was a problem: the slap wasn’t gummy. It was hard. Very hard. Like, brittle hard.
It didn’t taste bad, though. When I gave them out, some people swore by our gummy-slab pieces. But some others told me they thought it tasted like crap.
So what was the problem? I’d say either the recipe was foul, or it was because of the pectin mistake.
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Gummy bears? How hard could they be?
Pretty hard.
