[contemplative music]
- You have to work with flavors
and smells and touch and sight,
but you also have to hear what's going on.
That balance of all five senses
sort of is a tipping point
where you can do just about anything.
With our candy, we look back in time.
We go back to the 1800s, the Victorian period.
Many of our bits of equipment were made in that time period.
We're pretty much the only one who has started up again,
using this sort of equipment,
tracking it down and restoring it.
Today we're gonna be making sugarplum drop candies,
eggnog image candies, and peppermint candy canes.
First, we do the candy canes.
The first thing we do is we cook the sugar.
It's mixed with water and we're boiling all the water out.
We need to use two sugars
to interrupt the crystallization process,
sucrose and glucose.
If we just used sugar and water, when it hardened,
it would turn back into table sugar, it'd become granular.
- [Uri] Hot pot!
- [Greg] We have a team of five candy makers here
at Lofty Pursuits.
Uri and Jake were working with me today.
Everybody in the store knows when we make peppermint candy
because peppermint has a weird reaction to your skin.
It makes you feel cool.
- [Uri] Anybody who was, in any way, slightly congested
or had any letter of allergies at this point,
they will not after that.
- [Greg] Twenty-five pounds of candy canes
only take less than an ounce of peppermint oil.
When we make candy with multiple colors in it,
we add the food coloring on the table.
We do this so we can segment
and separate the different areas of color.
One of our specialized tools doesn't look like it's a tool.
It's a giant table.
The top is made out of a half-inch piece of steel
and has a water circulation system in it.
We use it to rapidly cool the hot sugar.
Where it comes in contact with the table
will cool off quickly.
But the bits not in contact don't cool that fast.
So, by folding the candy together,
we get to even out the heat
and pick the temperature we want.
We may want it to act more like a liquid
or more like a solid or somewhere in between.
- [Uri] Yeah, we're getting real close to stretch time.
- [Greg] Next, we make the amber sugar white.
This is a hand-wrought iron hook.
It's thicker than most of the other hooks that we encounter.
And this lets it radiate the heat better
so the candy is less likely to stick to the hook.
We have several hooks in the store,
but the one that I used today came from a store
called Mullane's, which was opened in 1848 in Cincinnati.
We changed the amber into white.
We pulled it about 75 times.
Each time we folded it, it trapped air bubbles
on the inside.
Those air bubbles are great
because those little round bubbles reflect light
back out and the random light
that they reflect appears white.
Then we start making the stripes on the heating table.
- [Uri] Make sure my stripes are super even in sickness.
- [Greg] Candy canes didn't always have stripes.
The first candy canes were white.
Actually, if you look at Victorian greeting cards,
which is the best way to look at the history of candy canes,
'cause they showed up on them,
it wasn't until the late 1800s the first stripes came out.
And this is partially because people thought
of peppermint as a white color.
- [Uri] I just wait for these two
to actually get stuck together.
- [Greg] One of the things about candy
that we have to be careful with is the colors
will migrate from one point into another.
In the candy canes, if they're too hot,
the red would actually bleed into the white parts
of the candy.
We don't want this to happen.
We do this by controlling the temperature
and the only way we can really tell the temperature
at this point is by feel.
We know how stiff the candy needs to be.
And that just comes with practice.
- [Uri] Here we come!
- [Greg] The batch roller twists the candy
as it forces it down the taper.
We don't want it to go too far, but it's kinda useful
in this case, to a point, because it puts the spiral
on the candy cane.
- [Uri] The first candy cane is born.
- [Greg] We add a spiral with our hands,
but we do it at the machine first.
Then we add the hook on the candy cane.
The hook on the top of the candy cane is made by bending it.
If you think of this, it's behaving like a tube.
The inside white is softer than the outside,
so we have to bend it very carefully.
We use our hands in a very similar way to a tube bender
that a plumber uses.
Then we have a little guide we use
to make sure they're all a consistent size.
And that's how we make candy canes.
Next, we'll make the drop candy.
[candy shatters]
We start the process the same,
boiling the sugar and adding the flavor.
The sugarplum is a drop candy where everything
is the same color.
Everything else we did used multiple colors.
Because of this, we could cheat a little.
We could add the coloring and the flavoring
in the pot at the same time.
- [Uri] Hot pot!
- [Greg] And when we poured it on the table,
we could pour it thinner and over a larger surface area
so it'll cool faster.
It just speeds up the candy making process.
We can tell by the texture of the sugar
the temperature of the sugar
and then we add the citric acid
'cause citric acid will burn if the sugar's too hot.
And the citric acid is the acid
that makes the flavors right.
Most of these flavors come with no acid in them
and most fruits have acid in it.
- [Uri] Just gets impossibly thin.
- [Greg] The problem with teaching candy making
is it's all about touch.
[hands clap]
The consistency changes constantly.
There's one point that we wanna cut it.
We wanna cut it when the outside is hard
and the inside's still liquid
so we can average out the temperatures.
- [Uri] You can see it's starting
to become a little bit more compact.
- [Greg] But then when we wanna manipulate it,
we want it more of a clay consistency
when we're doing the initial shape,
but we want it to get harder to keep the shapes
once it's done.
It went from a liquid to now it's behaving
like a non-Newtonian fluid.
And that means that right now it's flowing like a liquid,
but if you put a lot of pressure in it,
it would behave like a solid.
I still have a pair of scissors from my great-grandfather
when he was a tailor and they probably
took two weeks of salary to buy,
but he kept them for a lifetime
and he died before I was born.
The things that I own here for this candy making,
I don't feel like I'm an owner of,
I'm just a caretaker of, because they're gonna be here
generations after me and I have to preserve them
for the candy makers that follow me.
This is 150 year old equipment.
The machine is a fruit drop roller.
We're doing this by passing the candy through it
and getting out the shape at the other end.
Today, we use the diamond shape.
The diamond candy not only looks pretty,
but gives eight surfaces to be in your mouth
so the flavor spreads faster.
So we like this for subtle flavors like the sugarplum.
These candy machines haven't changed much
in the last 150 years.
They were developed by Thomas Mills & Brothers
in Philadelphia.
These machines are made out of cast iron.
They weigh 20 or 30 pounds each
and the rollers are solid bronze.
Everything needs to be non-stick on this
and, like a cast iron skillet,
we've made a non-stick by working in oil to the surface.
- [Uri] I'm gonna pre-cool some chunks over here.
- [Greg] The candy comes out of the machine
onto the candy cooling table.
Water is being sprayed on the underside of the top.
Can't have water on the candy, would make it sticky.
This freezes the candy in place
as soon as it comes out of the machine.
The rollers get it into the shape,
but it's the table itself that cools it off.
We slide it across the table when it's still behaving
about the consistency of shoe leather.
It's not rock-hard yet.
The sheet of candy comes out connected by sugar,
which we call flash.
The flash holds the candy together
when it comes to the machine,
but now we need to get rid of it.
We need to break the pieces apart.
And we do that by dropping the candy.
[candy shatters]
The last thing we have to do is get rid
of all the sugar dust, the remnants of the flash.
We have to do this because the candy, under its own weight,
just like glass to a certain point,
will fuse back to itself.
Various candy makers use different things.
I just use an old fryer that we bought for this purpose.
And that's how we make drop candies.
Finally, we'll make the eggnog cut rock image candy.
We start the process the same,
boiling the sugar and adding the flavor.
- [Uri] Hot pot!
- [Greg] I call it image candy,
the correct term is cut rock.
It was originally invented in Blackpool, England.
It's also sometimes called Blackpool Rock.
- [Uri] Mmm, smells like pink.
- [Greg] Blackpool rock is sold in a big piece
with the art all the way through,
like a stick of rock, they call it.
What we're doing is we're taking it to bite-sized pieces,
which is the cut rock part.
Okay, then, let's go. Let's go and get it.
The metal of the equipment's important.
All of our metal is mild steel, not stainless.
Stainless steel, because of the very nature
that makes it not rust, is not magnetic.
Sugar likes to stick to things
that are the same temperature as it.
And the table, if it heats up,
will become sticky to the candy,
the bars, if they heat up too much,
will become sticky to the candy.
With the image candy present, we needed the inside
to be cold because we needed to keep the detail in place.
I say we should move 'em to the table right about now.
- [Uri] I was gonna say, my piece is good.
I don't know if yours is.
- [Greg] Mine's a little hot, but we have time to cool it.
And I did this by cooling off the corners of the presents.
But we want the outside hotter so that that candy
can slide around it, share its heat, and stretch it out
so the image will scale.
You think that's enough or a little more?
- Put a little bit more. - Put more.
Like that?
One of the fun things about the image candies,
it's possibly the most creative candy we do
and some of the most complex.
We have to create three-dimensional art.
I think that's a good shade.
In the case of the present,
we wanted the inside color of the present,
the light blue, to be opaque.
So when we put a clear blue wrap around it,
light went through the clear blue, bounced back out,
and hit your eye and looked more spectacular.
- [Uri] Beautiful.
- That technique is called cloisonne, little boxes.
We're making a little box for the light
to bounce in and out.
And by tapering these circles of candy that I made,
sort of like candy straws that are filled with white candy,
I was able to make the illusion of a bow
or make the shape of the bow.
'Cause what good would a present be without a bow?
But the bow's designed to be much taller than it ended up.
I let the weight of the candy, being a non-Newtonian fluid,
get it to its final shape.
Once we have the shape of the center,
we pad it around with a white candy.
This is for two reasons.
One, it gets it away from the outer edge.
When the light goes through the wrap on the edge
of the present, it bounces back out at you.
Then we need to do an outer wrap of unpulled candy.
The pulled candy are like tiny little air bubbles,
so if we just cut through white candy, it might crumble,
it might make a diagonal cut.
But if we wrap it in the non wrapped candy,
non-pulled candy, we're able to create an outer level
that'll produce a crack around it
when we cut it and make smoother pieces.
Then we need to use gravity to make an even taper.
Our entire goal here is to make
a three-dimensional funnel of candy.
We've learned how to stretch the image down
and scale it without losing the detail,
without losing pieces, and without it distorting.
And that's what sometimes takes years to master.
Next, we put the candy on the batch roller and we pull it.
Before we had a batch roller,
we had one person rolling the candy
while one person was pulling it.
But now that person is replaced with high-technology,
high-technology from about 1910,
and this batch roller spins the candy.
The candy is a non-Newtonian fluid.
If we just left that cylinder alone,
it would go flat and spread out over the entire table.
But by keeping it moving, we keep it as a solid object.
Then we have to pull it.
We have to pull it gently, because if we pull it too fast,
it will snap when it's thick.
So we're sort of pulling it down, gently,
scaling it with very, very even pressure.
We then cut the pieces.
We do this on our canvil, a little candy anvil,
because we're sugar smiths.
This elevates it off the table and allows us to cut it
with our chopper.
And the knife hits it really hard.
All the pieces become bite-size and each piece
has an identical or nearly identical image in it.
[upbeat music]
People seem to forget that history isn't that far away
and the future isn't either
and we're just sort of here in the middle,
being a caretaker for what's around us.
Ideas, people, friendships, loves.
And if we can remember that, everything's as sweet as candy.