Equipment Check

There’s a saying, “it’s a poor worker who blames her tools”. Meaning, your craft skills are more the determinant of the quality of your final product than your tools are. That’s in line with what Kung Fu Chef says about the lamb chops he recently prepared in New Zealand…

Even so, there’s something to be said for being able to trust one’s equipment. I was recently experimenting in my home test kitchen and I started to suspect that one of my cheap-o candy thermometers was not accurately reporting the syrup temperature. I tested its accuracy by putting it in boiling water and what do you know! It read about 218 degrees F – six degrees higher than it should have.

When I cooked my next a batch of syrup I grabbed a digital thermometer that I trust more, and used them both. Interestingly, their readings tracked each other pretty well – within a few degrees of each other – until around 290 degrees when the the glass thermometer’s reading started to climb a lot faster.

This is a really big deal, because lollipop syrup must be cooked to what’s called the ‘hard crack stage’ which occurs at 302-310 F. My glass thermometer reading would have encouraged me to take the syrup off the stove too soon – and my lollipops would have been too soft and bendy because they would have too much water left in them.

I used the cold water test as a backup method for gauging the syrup’s temperature, and confirmed that my digital thermometer was more accurate than the glass one. I guess I had better stick to using the digital one from now on!

So if you’re making candy, it’s a good idea to occasionally check the accuracy of your thermometer – at sea level, it should read 212 F in boiling water and 32 F in ice water. Happy candy making!