Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

Looking for better testing, and slightly healthier alternative to chewy candy? How about pulling out the juicer, getting creative with essential oils and making an insanely flavor-packed real fruit snack. Two things matter in the recipe. One, juicing the fruits removes fiber which concentrates the flavors and two, adding essential oils really punches up the flavor in way that is otherwise impossible. Fruit also contains pectin, which is found in the cell walls of the plant or fruit fiber. Pectin is what gives some candies their chew. When you juice fruit, some pectin is still present in the juice, while some is dispelled with the fibrous scraps. Some fruits contain more pectin than others. Since we are removing some of that fruit mass through juicing, we will need to add some pectin to help our fruit leather set and become chewy candy.

Love Chewy Candy But Feel Bad About It? Try Modernist Fruit Roll-Ups