Owly055
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- Feb 28, 2014
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Today I made up a batch of very dark candi sugar, as a syrup. It was not for brewing, but for another project, but it was quite easy and yielded a great product.
The procedure was to put a quantity of ordinary table sugar and some citric acid in a small sauce pan with a small amount of water.... less than 25% of the quantity of sugar, though I didn't measure it.
This went on my induction cooktop at max setting, and I boiled it down, stirring frequently. As I approached the darkness I wanted.... about like very dark molasses, the water had mostly boiled out of the syrup, and there was little bubbling. My thermometer doesn't read as high as the temp was, but it was in the range of "OH WOW"........ extremely hot, napalm. Very dangerous stuff that would take your skin right off.
Meanwhile I had another sauce pan of water boiling merrily away, and when I reached the desired color, I carefully and slowly poured and stirred the hot sugar into the boiling water stirring constantly.......DO NOT POUR WATER INTO THE SUGAR..... EVER!!!.... this will cause an explosion, and a visit to the ER.
Once the sugar had entirely dissolved in the larger quantity of water, I poured the works back into the original sauce pan, and continued to boil it to dissolve any residual sugar, and reduce the quantity a bit.
The result was a lovely dark brown syrup with great flavor. The whole process went fairly quickly due to the small initial amount of water.
If you try this, do it ALONE without distraction. The potential for disaster is fairly high, and it requires care and thought to do it safely. An apron is a good idea, as spilling this on your pants, etc, it will stick and burn. Be very very careful. I've done this before, and I feel like I do when handling explosives..........
H.W.
The procedure was to put a quantity of ordinary table sugar and some citric acid in a small sauce pan with a small amount of water.... less than 25% of the quantity of sugar, though I didn't measure it.
This went on my induction cooktop at max setting, and I boiled it down, stirring frequently. As I approached the darkness I wanted.... about like very dark molasses, the water had mostly boiled out of the syrup, and there was little bubbling. My thermometer doesn't read as high as the temp was, but it was in the range of "OH WOW"........ extremely hot, napalm. Very dangerous stuff that would take your skin right off.
Meanwhile I had another sauce pan of water boiling merrily away, and when I reached the desired color, I carefully and slowly poured and stirred the hot sugar into the boiling water stirring constantly.......DO NOT POUR WATER INTO THE SUGAR..... EVER!!!.... this will cause an explosion, and a visit to the ER.
Once the sugar had entirely dissolved in the larger quantity of water, I poured the works back into the original sauce pan, and continued to boil it to dissolve any residual sugar, and reduce the quantity a bit.
The result was a lovely dark brown syrup with great flavor. The whole process went fairly quickly due to the small initial amount of water.
If you try this, do it ALONE without distraction. The potential for disaster is fairly high, and it requires care and thought to do it safely. An apron is a good idea, as spilling this on your pants, etc, it will stick and burn. Be very very careful. I've done this before, and I feel like I do when handling explosives..........
H.W.
