- When you think of candy at Christmas time,
candy canes come to mind.
People are super excited that we're doing them again.
Our candy canes are very handcrafted and handmade.
(furnace whirring)
Lucas Candies is a
126 year old candy shop
owned by myself and Debbie.
I'm the fourth generation owner
and we're getting ready for Christmas.
(upbeat music)
Today we're going to make candy canes.
They start out as really simple ingredients,
but we're first going to start with some sugar,
corn syrup, and water.
We use the blast furnace to cook the candy canes.
So, we're going to turn it on.
(furnace whirring)
So this furnace was put in,
I think in 1903,
you don't see too many of them around anymore
but it still works,
still functions, we use it daily.
So you just got to give the mixture a little stir.
Most of the people that have used furnaces like this have,
unfortunately, gone out of business.
So temperature is key,
so we have to put a thermometer in.
Final ingredient is a little trick,
you have to use cream of tartar.
Cream of tartar changes the acidity a bit
of the sugar mixture
and it just makes the
sugar stretch a little better
when we're trying to pull it.
We are going to cook this for about 25 minutes.
This is pretty good.
Ready to go?
- [Deb] I'm ready.
- Once we come upstairs, we both take our little jobs,
I do the white part,
Debbie does the red part.
- This is a steel cooling table,
it's around 2000 pounds.
I put Crisco on it so that the sugar won't stick.
We're going to pour this,
this is going to be the coloring
and the bars are there to keep the sugar hotter,
'cause I don't have as much.
And then this is going to be the peppermint.
- This is the key part of the whole process.
So I'm adding peppermint oil.
- So if you buy candy canes in the store,
they're pure white
and if you notice, if you suck on them,
the red stripe actually goes away.
And that's because they actually paint the red stripe,
or whatever color stripe,
where we actually do two different colors of sugar.
I'm going to add food coloring,
that way it doesn't steam out from the heat.
And so the white will have the peppermint
and then the red is plain sugar.
- So what we have to do now is
mix in the flavoring, mix in the coloring,
and cool the sugar at the same time.
Whew.
Peppermint oil is really strong,
when it hits the hot sugar, it starts to evaporate.
Most of it goes right into my face so,
I tend to cry a bit while I'm making it.
Can you smell that Deb? - [Deb] Oh yeah.
So my side's going to look not as pretty as his.
(laughing)
- [Nick] We'll be doing this
probably another five minutes or so,
just to get it to the right consistency and temperature.
- If we didn't have the gloves on,
we would be burning
our fingers.
- You can feel the heat through the gloves,
but just doesn't burn you.
- So for mine, I don't want to pull it too much
because then the redness will get whiter and whiter,
which we don't want.
I like a nice deep red.
The contrast between the peppermint
and just the sugar
adds for a different flavor palate
than your normal candy canes
that you get in the candy store.
- I'm actually checking to see how fluid it is,
'cause at a certain point,
we have to start pulling it on the hook.
- And if he cools it too much,
then when I try to mold it, it won't mold
as easily.
- And if you don't cool it enough,
then it stretches too easily and
you don't get nice candies either.
- And then you have flat candy canes.
- But we're almost there.
When you cook sugar,
it comes out this nice golden yellow color.
Unfortunately that's not traditional candy cane color,
so,
to get it more white,
we have to pull it on the hook.
The first couple batches came out very yellowy
and Debbie was not happy.
Seven,
eight,
nine.
What's actually happening is we're aerating it,
it means we're capturing air with every pull
and that turns it whiter and whiter.
So now,
you can see it is much whiter
than it was when we started.
If we keep going past 75,
it's just going to get cooler and cooler,
I don't think it'll get whiter.
- So right now I shape the white
and I dampen the sides
to help the sugar stick to each other.
So what I'm going to do, believe it or not,
these are going to be the stripes of the candy cane.
So this is where my work begins.
- [Nick] Are you ready?
- I'm ready.
I have more hand power I think.
- Oh, I'd say.
So with this first bit of candy that she's pulling out,
we're actually going to make little bite size pieces.
So this is a candy cutter
from
1905.
Push down.
(upbeat music)
(light rustling)
And it makes pieces.
So these will cool in a few minutes.
- When we were deciding about the size of the candy canes
I told Nick I wanted firetruck candy canes
and he had no idea what I was talking about.
So I told him, when I was a little girl,
my favorite memory was Santa on a firetruck
and he would get off the firetruck
and he would hand you these big candy canes.
I remember thinking they were massive.
I wanted to make sure that we created a candy cane
that was memorable to the children and even to the parents.
If you can see, the sugar is hot on the inside
but the outside is getting too cool,
so it's starting to crack.
So that means that the sugar is cooling down
on the outside too much.
Like see how it's creasing here?
It's a little hot,
so it's starting to fold in on itself.
We have the heat lamps
and they keep the outside hot
so that they don't crack.
- [Nick] Uh uh. That's over here,
see, wants to pass through the window.
- No, no, that's because that's supposed to be in there.
We try not to
argue.
There's always, you know, two people running a business,
we have difference of opinions.
We have learned to communicate with each other much better.
See like here, I pulled a little too much,
so now the sugar almost turned pink.
We've probably made 10,000 candy canes, at least.
- [Nick] Oh yeah, easy
- I can make, I usually make a-
Do you want me to make a big one?
(upbeat music)
I love how her eyes light up.
(gasping) (laughing)
- [Nick] First year we did them,
we severely underestimated it.
We had a couple hundred made
and we thought that would last a season
and we sold 3,000 in a week.
It keeps us busy.
- Brittle is
peanuts, sugar, corn syrup
and then you add baking soda
and that makes it rise and aerate a little bit.
- Okay, so now we're going to make our Beer Brittle.
Beer brittle is old-fashioned peanut brittle,
but instead using water, we use craft beer.
So basically we start with sugar.
This is corn syrup, but in solid form,
it reduces the moisture a little bit, so it's not so sticky.
- So we use a very old recipe.
- [Nick] Yeah, it was my great great uncle's recipe.
- So we changed it up a little bit.
Nick and I are huge craft beer lovers,
maybe we should add beer
into the brittle and see if it changes the flavor
and, sure enough, it worked.
- It is a chocolate and peanut butter porter.
We're going to light our blast furnace again
(furnace whirring) we have to mix it,
make sure the sugar is completely dissolved in the liquid.
Just wait till it gets to temperature
and we'll be ready to go.
We're going to add peanuts next,
these are raw Spanish peanuts
because the peanuts will actually cook in the sugar,
so you get a nice roasty flavor
and it mixes in a little better.
So we're going to pour them in.
So now unfortunately,
we have to constantly stir
the mixture because if the peanuts sit, they'll burn.
We have to cook it to 310 degrees
and then we'll be ready to pour it.
- I am definitely stronger than I used to be.
Yeah, yeah.
- Oh yeah.
- But mine's more forearm from the
twisting and the carrying. - Yep.
- [Deb] Muscle mass, out of the two of us, you.
- [Nick] Yeah, a little bit.
- [Deb] He actually had to change sized shirts
because the arms would not fit around his t-shirts.
- You ready?
- I'm ready.
So the first thing we're doing is adding butter solids.
Again, we're trying to reduce the moisture,
so instead of using regular butter,
I want the brittle to be as brittle as possible.
So this is baking soda
and salt
and this is what's going to
make the brittle rise and aerate.
And this, he has to whip,
to get all that baking soda into the sugar and beer.
So now we're just going to wait for it to rise.
Once it starts to bubble,
then we know that it's risen as much as it can
and then we'll pour it on the table.
It doesn't look that appealing to me at the moment.
I would say the most satisfying, obviously is,
watching people experience beer brittle for the first time
and never tasting it and being completely amazed.
So we let this set for a couple minutes.
The bottom has to get hard
and then what we're going to do is cut it into pieces.
First thing I'm going to do is
just make sure that the bottom
is hard enough for us to flip
and then I'm going to cut.
So Nick's going to flip
the two ends and then together
we flip the bigger piece in the middle.
- Now we need to stretch it out,
just so we make it a little thinner,
cools faster and easier to eat.
- Easier to eat.
So we used to hand break it
and then we were cleaning and we found this
and his dad goes,
"Oh-
- [Nick] "That's the brittle hammer."
- "That's the brittle hammer."
We're like, "The what?"
He goes, "Yeah, look",
and we're like,
"You couldn't have told us that like a year ago?".
- Debbie started here about 15 years ago,
our children were actually friends first.
She did bring a lot of changes
and a lot of new ideas to the established business.
- [Deb] So now we have to break it up
so it'll fit in our package.
So we just use our little hammer
and it breaks like glass.
(upbeat music)
- So this is our chocolate-making room.
This is our main chocolate kettle,
it holds about 600 pounds at a time,
primarily used for milk chocolate,
'cause that's what we sell the most of.
So we generally go through
around 20,000 pounds of chocolate a year.
Here's our Christmas tree mold we're going to do for today.
We have literally thousands of different molds.
Whenever you deposit chocolate into the cavities,
you end up with little air bubbles,
so this shakes the chocolate so that
the air bubbles rise to the top
and then, into the cooler.
Alright, we have Santa also,
we make lots of these this time of year.
We make snowmen, Santa Claus, Christmas trees.
Christmas time, we make a variety of different shapes.
- I think, 15 years ago,
I would tell myself today to enjoy the accomplishments.
We're always so busy.
You go from one season to the next, to the next
and there's never that moment where you celebrate
that you actually did something amazing.
- [Nick] This business, along with every small business,
is extremely challenging and frustrating.
It's easy to get discouraged.
You really got to stay positive
to do things that nobody else does.
We enjoy it, appreciate the successes,
work through the failures as fast as possible,
'cause there's always something coming
that's going to be equally cool.
(upbeat music)