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Vox Humana
 
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Default Why is Corn Syrup a key ingredient to Peanut Brittle?


"shipwreck" > wrote in message
...
> OK, but what about caramel. What happens there? No syrup in that.
> Does it remain soft or will it also harden at 300F?
>
> Just trying to understand.


The longer you cook sugar solutions, more water is evaporated. If you want
a soft caramel, you stop the cooking at a lower temperature. As others have
stated, the corn syrup is added to sugar solutions to inhibit
crystallization. You are starting with a saturated solution of rather pure
sucrose in water and are further concentrating it by boiling off the water.
Eventually the sugar molecules will want to form very large crystals and
result in an undesirable texture. Glucose has a different crystal shape
than sucrose. Putting some glucose (or other sugar) in with the sucrose
helps prevent the crystals from forming. If you had a big bag of wooden
block that you continually drew closed with a draw string, eventually a lot
of the blocks would touch and form large cubes (crystals) made of many
smaller blocks. If you started with blocks and added a bunch of tennis
balls, when the bag constricted, the blocks wouldn't be able to join into
large units (crystals) because the tennis balls would be randomly
interspersed.

Another approach to the problem of crystallization is to add some acid to
the pot. When sucrose is heated with acid, some of it turn into fructose.
You might take a look at "Cookwise" by Shirley O. Corriher. She does a good
job of explaining these things.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...85718?v=glance