On this series of pages, you will see, stage by stage, the art and craftsmanship of the traditional candy making process, as performed by our expert "Candy Craftsmen". For all of our candy, the process starts the same, with the cooking of the syrup in open copper pans over open gas fires, and the tipping of this mixture onto a cooling table. These two processes are shown and described below, after which you are presented with three choices. Click on Pineapple Rock to see the ongoing processes in the making of this mouth-watering confection. Click on the stripes in Humbugs to unravel the mystery of how we get those stripes on humbugs.
We make a wide variety of sweets, and will be showing you how we make more kinds of sweets on these pages in the future, so if you want to learn more about the intricate skills of candy making, please do bookmark our site and revisit soon.
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BOILING This is one of the main things setting our sweets apart from modern, mass produced sweets. We select only the finest cane sugars and glucose syrup, and hand-weigh these into the traditional OPEN COPPER PAN. A 60% sugar to 40% glucose solution is prepared and boiled over an OPEN GAS FIRE to a temperature of 150 Centigrade (300 Fahrenheit). Batch open pan gas fire boiling is the only traditonnal method of cooking. It may be slower and more labour intensive than modern continuous cooking or steam batch cookers, but it brings out the flavours and colours better in the finished product. |
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TIPPING Once the syrup has reached the right temperature, it is removed from the flame and carefully tipped onto a cast iron cooling table, where it spreads out until it fills the entire table with a thin "slab" of molten sugar/glucose (about 25mm, or 1 inch, thick). |
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