Crystal Catastrophe!

One tip for successful hard candy making is to use a damp pastry brush to wash down the sides of your pan with a little bit of water. This helps prevent crystals from forming, which can revert your glossy syrup into a crunchy granulated wreck.

In my years of making hard candy lollipops, I’ve only ever had one batch crystalize – and that was back when I was still just learning the ropes at home. Until last month, that is… 

I was taking the temperature of the syrup and as I moved the probe across the pan, I heard a strange, faint creaky sound. I looked more closely, and I could actually see sugar crystals forming on the bubbling surface of the syrup. This batch was a goner. I grabbed a sheet pan, sprayed it quickly with nonstick spray, and poured out the syrup into it to cool off before discarding it.


The clumpy crust that remained in the pan also shows off that crystallized residue very nicely:


On reflection, I’m pretty sure I know what happened. There are several prep tasks that I do while a batch is cooking, such as putting the sticks into the molds. I was running a little behind schedule, so I turned the burner off temporarily while I continued getting set up. The crystals probably formed around the rim of the pan just above the level of the syrup. When I turned the burner back on, I should have checked for crystal formation.

In fact, I probably should have just turned the burner way down so the cooking process wasn’t interrupted.

Well, and in fact, I should have been a little more organized in the first place, and not started cooking the batch before I was ready :-)