My discovery requires an explanation, or clarification, or admission of my ignorance; whatever.

Was the previous article wrong, naïve, or just inaccurate?

So, delving into the corn syrup ingredient controversy, I found myself vindicated. Corn syrup is not an additional ingredient at all, it’s just another form of sugar. Ha!

Corn syrup is simply a liquid sweetener. It’s a sugar made from cornstarch. Corn syrup comprises pure glucose, a simple sugar. Table sugar, the white crystal sugar I dump in my Cheerios and you into your coffee in the morning, consists of sucrose, which comprises glucose and fructose.

Because of its properties as a liquid sweetener, we use corn syrup in candies to provide shine and to prevent the crystallization of the sugars. Corn syrup also provides moisture to caramel, helping maintain its softness.

Let me defend the good name of the corn syrup we use while making caramel we use with hand dipped chocolates. Lots of nutty health folks these days (and I’m not talking about nuts in caramel, I’m talking about nuts in the media) like to confuse the public when they criticize high fructose corn syrup. Corn syrup is not the same thing as high-fructose corn syrup. High-fructose corn syrup, which you can’t buy in the supermarket or even in the mini-mart, is completely different. High-fructose corn syrup is a commercial sweetener that is made by taking ordinary corn syrup and converting some of the glucose into fructose by adding enzymes. That conversion makes it almost twice as sweet as table sugar. That extra sweetness, along with the fact that it is cheap to produce, makes high-fructose corn syrup ideal for commercially produced foods like soda, candy, etc. So, why are the nutty folks against high-fructose corn syrup? I guess because it will make you fatter, faster.

There are two varieties of corn syrup, light and dark. Light of course is colorless and has a pure, sweet flavor. The dark corn syrup includes molasses which gives it a darker color and more of the caramel-like flavor. You can interchange them, but the flavors are a bit different, as is the appearance.

Culinary experts with a bit more experience than me, claim corn syrup enhances not just my caramel, but its use pays off with homemade ice cream, sugary syrups and even cakes. It does this because corn syrup is such an excellent smoothing agent. It prevents hard crystals from forming in the sugar, which has the tendency to recrystallize making your finished product grainy or gritty, and yes, that is redundant.

Before I get all scientific here, let me state for the record – sugar is sugar, and I’m a big fan. In fact, because of sugar, I am big. So, let’s get that out of the way. But while we talk about such sweet things, let’s talk sugar in general. There’s more to sugar than just the white stuff on the table and corn syrup in the cupboard. I mentioned glucose and fructose, but what about all the other ‘ose’ ending foods, like lactose, dextrose, and sucrose?

In an effort to confuse you and make smart people who think they know chemistry go crazy; let me explain what all these ‘ose’ sugars are. They’re disaccharides. I think that means ‘double sugars.’ In other words, they’re just different combinations of molecules that come from different plant and animal sources and they differ in the way the plant or animal creates and utilizes them and the way we extract and use them. They are the energy system for life. Wow, was that brilliantly said?” And then of course, if a disaccharide is a double sugar, then a monosaccharide is just a plain old lonely sugar. And yes, they are carbohydrates. (Now you can relax because I used a word you recognize)

Let’s briefly look at each of the common sugars.

SUCROSE

Sucrose, is table sugar, and it is the most common disaccharide that us non-dieting humans eat. It comprises the monosaccharides, glucose and fructose. When we digest disaccharides like sucrose, they break down into their simple sugars we use for energy.

MALTOSE

Maltose, also known as malt sugar, is formed from two glucose molecules. Malt is formed when grains soften and grow in water, and it is a component of beer, starchy foods like cereal, pasta, and potatoes, and many sweetened processed foods.

LACTOSE

Lactose, or milk sugar, is made up of galactose and glucose. The milk of mammals is high in lactose and provides nutrients for infants. I once read that most mammals can only digest lactose as infants, and when humans are able to digest dairy products in adulthood, it’s because they have a mutation that allows them to do so. I also read that this mutation became prevalent in our populations around 10,000 years ago. I need to get a t-shirt that says I’m a proud mutant.

TREHALOSE

Trehalose is also made up of two glucose molecules like maltose, but the molecules link differently. We find trehalose in certain plants like fungi, and in animals like shrimp and insects. They say the blood sugar of many insects, such as bees, grasshoppers, and butterflies, is made up of trehalose. Because of it breaks down efficiently, it provides rapid energy for flight.

LACTULOSE

Lactulose is formed from fructose and galactose. It mostly has medical uses. Some countries use it in food, but not in the United States, where it’s viewed as a pharmaceutical that might potentially harm diabetics.

CELLOBIOSE

Like maltose and trehalose, cellobiose is also made up of two glucose molecules, but they are linked even more differently. Since I don’t wish to learn more science that doesn’t result in the taste of my caramel. This is all the ‘ose’s we’ll discuss here.

From all of this ‘ose’ rambling, what we need to know is, we often use corn syrup in making our caramel because it’s a great sweetener and an outstanding agent in helping the other sugars behave themselves. Corn Syrup is not mandatory. We use a variety of recipes for caramel, and they don’t all call for corn syrup. But now you know why with some, we do. In a future article, we’ll cook two versions side by side and compare the final products.

The post Corn Syrup, The Sweetener For All Ages first appeared on handdippedchocolates.com.

From an entire tray of hand dipped chocolates, my two favorites are the chocolate dipped caramels and the chocolate dipped turtles. I concede that turtles are made up of caramel and pecans – (I admit pecans are nuts.)

Why? Like any of our favorites, it’s the flavor & texture combination.

At the risk of offending our chocolate purists, who pride themselves in claiming the rich romantic Mesoamerican heritage of chocolate’s ancestry; caramel has an uncertain and questionable ancient past. Though caramel and caramel candies have been with us for centuries, their exact origins are a bit murky. We may question their family tree.

All my extensive research leads me a thousand years back to the Arabs. When I think about the Arabs, I don’t ponder the peace accords or middle east conflicts or even caramel. My mind reflects back to Ahab the Arab. Ahab however has nothing to do with caramel, so I’ll let you figure it out. Except maybe all the caramel historians got it wrong and they thought they were researching camels not caramels. But that’s your issue.*

Some say the Arabs first discovered caramel around 1000 A.D. Again, I don’t know who “some” really is, or is that are? But suffice to say, what we believe is there is evidence that around 1,000 A.D. the Arabs were crystallizing sugar to make what translators think the Arabs called a “kurat al milh” or “sweet ball of salt” or  “ball of sweet.” These first caramels aren’t like the caramel we enjoy today. That ball of sweet was a hard candy – rock hard – solid hard. That was due to the combination of sugar and water they were boiling over kettles.

Some say one form of this crystallized sugar and water mixture was used mainly in the beauty industry for waxing and sugaring—something I know nothing about. It was only later that the ‘ball of sweet’ became a confection.

Eventually, those tired of chipping their teeth, learned they could toss some milk and a little fat into the kettle and the results were a creamy texture with some stretchy consistency – basically more like our modern-day caramel.

Theory holds that somewhere in the mid 1600’s fat and milk became the more common tools to give caramel its chewiness.

Theory aside, we know that when milk solids and fats are heated with sugar and allowed to caramelize, we get some version of our current types of caramel. Note that we use the verb version (caramelize) of our noun (caramel) here. The Arabs probably didn’t know how to use verbs as nouns and so historians couldn’t accurately record the history of caramel and that’s why caramel’s origins are murky.

But in modern implementation of verbs and nouns, caramel remains a favorite treat because the nouns include sugar, milk, corn syrup and fat (butter). The verbs are ‘to heat’ and ‘to stir.’ Throw in an adverb; ’constantly’ and you have chocolate’s BFF.

Any wonder caramel has been so popular and remains a favorite sweet treat? It’s all about simple ingredients combined in just the right way. The results are delicious.

Jumping forward a few hundred years, caramel’s popularity increased greatly when Milton S. Hershey began his first successful candy business in 1886 called the Lancaster Caramel Company. Because you’re smart and you read what I said first, you quickly thought of the second candy company. But let’s stick with the first company Lancaster Caramel Company, which after it was established, was shipping caramel candies across the United States and to Europe.

Hershey’s introduction of caramel candies grew on a grand scale. Since then, caramel candy has taken on many forms and textures, such as sauces, creams, hard and soft candies, and glazes for foods such as popcorn.

Let’s get a little more granular. (Purposely a pun)

We’ve covered the fact that caramel is a combination of a few simple ingredients—sugar, water, fat, and milk. Now when combined in different orders, they will yield very different forms of caramel.

For instance, the traditional “dry method” of caramel making starts with boiling just your sugar, (yes, just melting the sugar dry) and adding the other three ingredients after. The other alternative “wet method” boils sugar and water together as one, and then adds the fat and milk later—this is what most caramel manufacturers do.

Depending on the method that you choose, your caramel will look and taste quite different—the dry method leads to a thicker, darker caramel that is used in hard candy, while the wet method results in the good stuff used for hand dipped chocolates.

Oh, and by the way, during the Lancaster Caramel Co.’s final years, Hershey shifted his focus toward chocolate and created the Hershey’s Chocolate Company as a subsidiary of Lancaster. Then in 1900, Hershey sold off the entire caramel business to The American Caramel Company for a sly $1 million thinking that it was just a fad and chocolate had more long-term potential. What’s he thinking now?

*

The post The History of Caramel first appeared on handdippedchocolates.com.