Let the Games Begin

What makes chewy candies so appealing? Texture is a huge part of it. That's why a lot of professional chefs love making candy—manipulating texture is what chefs do. Professional confectioners, too, are masters of texture, and they're seriously well-schooled in the ingredients that go into our favorite confections. 

For every piece of chewy candy, there are a few key elements that dictate texture: Soluble solids control the firmness of a certain product; gums control the "bite" (supple, snappy, or brittle, for example); and fat and air soften the texture in a way that soluble solids alone cannot. Candies like Starburst, for example, seem hard at first, but then yield to your bite. It’s the high concentrations of soluble solids that make them hard; incorporating air and fat, meanwhile, make the texture soft enough to chew. 

The science of candy-making is complex (and fascinating), and understanding a few basic concepts will give you the knowledge you need to get started at home.

Confectionery Geekery

Making Your Own Chewy Candy

For many American kids, Starburst is "the one." The candy they always buy at the movies, hoard on Halloween, and dream about when facing down a heap of broccoli and a warning from mom to "eat every bite."

There's a reason the young ones love it so. Bright in flavor, with a yielding, chewy softness and the mouth-coating heft that can only come from added fat, Starburst is a uniquely satisfying confection. So it shouldn't surprise you that it takes some effort to do it DIY. In commercial factories, powerful machines perform the pulling required to align sugar crystals and incorporate air into candy. At home, it's your arms that do all the work. Basically, you pull until you can't pull no more. The more you pull, the softer and fluffier your candy becomes. (We suggest enlisting a friend or two to help, especially if you are planning to color your confections. More on that below.) 

Prepare to fall hard for this intricately textured homemade candy—exactly like the stuff you savored as a kid, only super-fresh and imbued with all the tender care you put into making it. The broccoli probably doesn't sound so bad anymore, but dessert is just as sweet.

Starburst-Style Chewy Candy

All the gummy candies made by German confectionery company Haribo have an obsessive following, but none more so than the iconic Gold Bears. Tartaric acid—citric works too—gives these babies a note of sourness to balance the sugar, and the tender-but-chewy texture makes them insanely addictive.

According to the company's [link https://www.haribo.com/enUS/home.html website], they were invented in 1922 by one Hans Riegel—who originally dubbed them "Dancing Bears"—and inspired by the trained bears that performed at festivals and markets in Germany. So, that's a little sad. Everything else about this **original Haribo recipe,** however, is happy. 

Taught to ChefSteps co-founder Chris Young by master confectioner Christian Sobolta, a graduate of the famed [link http://www.zds-solingen.de/en/ ZDS] confectionary school in Solingen, Germany, it yields treats as tasty as the ones the kinder can be found snacking on in Dierdorf and Haselünne. 

Sorbitol, a sugar alcohol, is vital to this recipe, lending the gummies their springy quality, but you can flavor them with any essential oil you like. In the US, Gold Bears come in five flavors: raspberry (red); orange (orange); pineapple (colorless); lemon (yellow); and strawberry (green). Yup, you read that right. Green gummy bears are strawberry-flavored. Maybe Hans Riegel was colorblind?

Gummy “Bears”

Could there be any more divisive food than black licorice? People who hate it, hate it. Fans, meanwhile, will tell you that loving this candy is a sign of a superior palette and generally sophisticated life view. Earthy and complex, black licorice charms the sort of flavor-seeker who goes nuts for the powerfully smokey Scotches of Islay, the tangy, pungent notes of Laotian cuisine, or the glorious stink of a truly funky blue cheese. 

The candy shares a name with licorice root, a plant that, while not botanically related to anise or fennel, has a similar flavor profile. It can be flavored with an extract from the licorice root itself or, as in this recipe, with anise essential oil instead. (A combination of both is not unheard of, either). Recipes for red licorice—a far less-controversial confection—omit molasses (adjusting sweetness with other sugars) and caramel coloring, and swap cherry or strawberry for the anise or licorice root. Below, we walk you through making both using a method that our kitchen developed after recreating a number of recipes, eventually landing on the exact chewy texture we were after. Serve the anise-laced version at your next party and—who knows?—you may bring a few friends over to the dark side.

Licorice

Children the world over associate Turkish delight with a magic wardrobe and a hidden world—it’s the treat that the White Witch uses to enchant children in Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—but it’s possible the gummy, powdered sugar–covered cube had medicinal origins. Known in Turkish as rahat lokum, which is derived from the Arabic for “throat’s ease,” the rosewater-flavored sweet may have been invented by Arab apothecaries as the ninth-century equivalent of a cough drop. 
 
Fast forward to the present day. This chocolate version was first developed by ChefSteps cofounder Chris Young at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen in 2007. Turkish delight gets its characteristic gelled, gummy texture from the reaction of pectin with acidic flavorings such as lemon juice. A combination of LM pectin and a modified starch creates the perfect chocolate Turkish delight. Blumenthal never served this recipe, but we felt it would be a shame to let the technique go to waste, and we’ve adapted the recipe to work with a more readily available starch. The result is a chocolate-flavored sweet that would lure anyone to Narnia, no questions asked.

Chocolate Turkish Delight

Attention British friends: These aren’t like the Maynards Wine Gums you snacked on as kids. We actually put wine in ours. We use full-bodied reds such as syrah, but a sweet white—Sauternes?—would work nicely too. Elegantly textured and bursting with winey flavor, these little gummies make great post-dessert desserts (mignardises, in culinary speak) at special-occasion dinners, and nobody’s going to complain when you bust them out as a surprise treat while hiking, sailing, picnicking, or camping. 

Couple of things: First, this is one of those times when equipment is kind of important. While you can pour liquid candy into the molds using alls sorts of stuff, doing so with a [link http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VMAVDC/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B001VMAVDC&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=delvkitc-20 sauce gun]—also known as a confectionery funnel—is pretty great for filling molds neatly. It’s also designed to push air upward, helping to preserve the texture and taste of your candy. 

Second, this is not a good procrastinator’s recipe. The great chewy texture of our wine gums comes from gelatin, and though they can set in a high-powered fridge in as little as four hours, you may recall from your Jell-O shot days that gelatin can take a while longer to set fully, depending on conditions. Instead of stressing about it, make these gums the night before, pour yourself a glass of that leftover vino, and go to bed dreaming of the perfect candies you’ll wake up to in the morning.

Wine Gums

If you’ve ever made jelly, jam, or marmalade, then you’re familiar with pectin, the gelling agent usually responsible for those jiggly preserves. While there’s no shortage of commercially developed pectin on the market, it actually occurs naturally in the cell walls of plants, binding cells together to help the organism grow. For hundreds of years, it has been an integral ingredient in pâte de fruit, the brightly hued chewy treat that French confiseurs display so proudly, like a sparkly bauble in a jewelry store window. 

Traditional pectin (labeled [link https://www.chefsteps.com/ingredients/hm-pectin “HM”]) gels only in the presence of both sugar and acid. It’s important when making pâte de fruit that the pectin doesn’t start working its gelling magic too early in the process, thus interfering with that perfect, firm-but-yielding texture we’re after. To avoid this, we add tartaric acid after we cook the other ingredients together. We cast the candy in one big block, cutting it into cute little cubes after it has set. An optional step: soak your cubes in enough Everclear to cover before you roll them in a coating of sugar. The Everclear desiccates the candy, forming a leathery skin on its surface that will keep the rolling sugar from turning sticky and syrupy for several hours. (Adding this step won’t make the candy boozy. If you want confections with a kick, you’ll need to use a spirit with water in it, such as vodka. Soak the sweets in that for about 12 hours in the fridge, and you’ll have a truly adults-only party snack. This will work with gummy candies too. Please remember to always make good choices.)

Before you begin assembling your ingredients, decide the exact texture you are after. This will help you determine the temperature to which you want to heat the mixture in Step 6. For a lighter, fresher confection, heat to [c 107]. If you prefer a denser, more “cooked”-tasting candy, you can keep heating up to [c 120]. You’ll also need to land on a flavor, of course. To preserve the just-picked flavor of summer fruits like cherries and grapes, we like to cut things off at a low temperature, whereas we suggest heating fall fruits—apples, pears, persimmons—to a higher one. Good restaurants often send diners away with a few pâte de fruit as a parting gift, a classy tradition that could easily be adopted at private dinner parties. These candies also make great favors for weddings, showers, and other such celebratory occasions.

NOTE: Here, we used highly acidic concord grape juice. When working with juices that are weaker in flavor, such as apple, you can replace the water in the recipe with additional juice.

Pâte de Fruit

DIY Chewy Candy Recipes

Hit the Books

Discussion

Additional Information

You know that legendary George Mallory quote about why he climbed Mount Everest? “Because it’s there,” he said. Well, here at ChefSteps, that’s how we feel about candy-making. When we’re standing in the grocery store checkout line, staring at a brightly packaged bundle of Starburst or gummy bears, it’s in our nature to want to reproduce these textural wonders at home. Manipulating textures, after all, is what chefs do. You may think these classic sweets are impossible to create at home, but trust us: they’re not. Yes, you’ve got to be patient. You’ve got to be precise. And if it’s Starburst-style chews you’re after, you’ve got to be pretty ripped as well. (Ever seen someone “pull” saltwater taffy? Yeah, we’re going to be doing a lot of that.) The more delicately limbed among you may opt to start with our juicy Pâte de Fruit or the classic Haribo gummy bear recipe, reproduced here. Black licorice lovers—don’t be shy, we dig it too—wait until you try our toothsome version, laced with anise essential oil. Not into the anise-flavored stuff? We’ve got the formula for other flavors too. Backing it all up: a primer on the basic science of confections, so you can bone up on the ingredients that determine each candy’s unique texture. Sure it takes a little focus, but hey—it’s not rocket science. It’s not extreme mountaineering either. It’s candy-making. And it’s one of the more satisfying things you’re likely to achieve without risking frostbite. NOTE: The recipes in this class require a digital thermometer.

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