Salt Water Taffy, Take 1

After procuring glycerin at the local health food store, it was time to try to make some salt water taffy. My brother agreed to help. I won't post the recipe here, because it didn't really work out. I combined three recipes--two from candy cookbooks and one that I dug up at The Exploratorium, not exactly known for its culinary excellence.



I think there were a couple of problems. First off, you need a lot of flavoring to overpower the super gross flavor of glycerin. We tried vanilla and lemon. The lemon was more successful because it had more flavoring, but I could really taste the glycerin in both and it was gross.



That was a secondary problem, really. The primary problem was that I overheated the sugar. Recipes call for the mixture to be heated to soft crack stage (270 F). I was using two candy thermometers, a good one and, as it turns out, a very bad one. The bad one was telling me that the temperature was lower than it actually was, while the higher one was right on target. I let the mixture get much too hot by basically averaging the thermometer readings… the mixture definitely made it to hard crack stage (300 F), or close. I was also testing the mixture in cold water. The problem with that was that the mixture never got completely hard in water— it the glycerin meant it was always a little gooey. The result was candy that we could stretch, but not cut. Because it had glycerin, it wasn't completely hard, but it was hard enough to pull out a tooth if you tried to chew it.



We got some great pictures though! I'm not sure if I'll try to make this salt water taffy again, but I might be tempted to try again with a molasses or brown sugar based recipe. Those always tasted better anyway, and I think would help with the glycerin flavor problem. Below and above are images of what most of the final batch looked like--hard to cut, greasy and, eventually, brittle.

Salt Water Taffy ingredient comes in varied forms, not all edible

I purchased a box of mediocre taffy (see above) in Provincetown this weekend at a store that had great local fudge. The taffy, however, was sub par (and from Maine). It tasted too much like bubble gum and came in flavors like blue raspberry and root beer. I prefer lemon or molasses.

I figured it was time I tried to make some salt water taffy of my own. The candy's secret ingredient--all recipe books agree--is glycerin. All three cook books I looked in also said that I could procure glycerin at my local pharmacy. Not so much. The only glycerin that I could find at Duane Reade came in suppository form. Could work, I thought, but how would I know how to measure two tablespoons of it? Furthermore, according to The Internets, one should only ingest food-grade glycerin. I'm going to check for that kind at my local dietary supplement store tomorrow. If that doesn't work out, I'll order some from Amazon.