I found out recently that July 20 is National Lollipop Day, so I got my OCD self into gear to create some lollipops.
The first thing I needed to do was pick a recipe. A Google search revealed several possibilities. Some lollipops included cream, butter, and vinegar, among other ingredients. The basic lollipop recipe seemed to be a combination of sugar and corn syrup with color and flavor added. Therefore, I concentrated on finding the proper ration of sugar to syrup. It seems there is no exact proper ratio. Looking through the top 100 "lollipop recipe" results yielded 54 unique lollipop recipes that did not involve cannabis. Of these 54 recipes, there was no ratio that got the majority, though 3:1 was the clear front runner with 22 recipes. The runners up were 4:1 at 10 recipes and no corn syrup at 8 recipes.
That raises the question: Why corn syrup? Well, sugar has a tendency to crystalize. To prevent this, inhibitors to crystallization are added. Corn syrup is one such inhibitor. Others include cream of tartar and vinegar. So, to prevent crystallization, corn syrup is added to the sugar.
Another thing almost every recipe adds is water. I think that is a bit of a waste. The idea of boiling sugar is to remove the water. Why, then, start by adding more water. That only adds to the time it takes for the sugar to reach the proper temperature.
Therefore, I have decided to make my first batch of lollipops using only 3 parts sugar and 1 part corn syrup. (This ratio was the most used and was in Martha Stewart's and Food Network's recipes, so it is good enough for me.) I am going to do this without adding any color or flavor yet in order to familiarize myself with the process, then I am going to play with color and flavor combinations. Hopefully, this will not take too long. I hope to do my first cooking later this week.
In the meantime, chow for now.
The first thing I needed to do was pick a recipe. A Google search revealed several possibilities. Some lollipops included cream, butter, and vinegar, among other ingredients. The basic lollipop recipe seemed to be a combination of sugar and corn syrup with color and flavor added. Therefore, I concentrated on finding the proper ration of sugar to syrup. It seems there is no exact proper ratio. Looking through the top 100 "lollipop recipe" results yielded 54 unique lollipop recipes that did not involve cannabis. Of these 54 recipes, there was no ratio that got the majority, though 3:1 was the clear front runner with 22 recipes. The runners up were 4:1 at 10 recipes and no corn syrup at 8 recipes.
That raises the question: Why corn syrup? Well, sugar has a tendency to crystalize. To prevent this, inhibitors to crystallization are added. Corn syrup is one such inhibitor. Others include cream of tartar and vinegar. So, to prevent crystallization, corn syrup is added to the sugar.
Another thing almost every recipe adds is water. I think that is a bit of a waste. The idea of boiling sugar is to remove the water. Why, then, start by adding more water. That only adds to the time it takes for the sugar to reach the proper temperature.
Therefore, I have decided to make my first batch of lollipops using only 3 parts sugar and 1 part corn syrup. (This ratio was the most used and was in Martha Stewart's and Food Network's recipes, so it is good enough for me.) I am going to do this without adding any color or flavor yet in order to familiarize myself with the process, then I am going to play with color and flavor combinations. Hopefully, this will not take too long. I hope to do my first cooking later this week.
In the meantime, chow for now.
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