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CLEVELAND — There’s science behind your favorite candy. Kind of like a classic peanut brittle.
“What’s happening inside this copper pot is boiling sugar and glucose,” said Mike Murray, president and CEO of Murray’s Chocolate. .
That’s to remove the water before adding the peanuts. The protein mixes with the sugar and the Maillard browning reaction begins.
“It contains amino acids and reduces the sugar content that gives the caramel color,” Murray said, while the mixture quickly turned brown.
Adding baking soda aerates the mixture by releasing carbon dioxide.
“Now we’re going to actually look at aeration of brittle materials. That baking soda. Salt. There. It has the bubbles I was looking for,” said Marie, seeing the change.
Timing is important, as brittle areas need to be stretched before they cool.
“He has to pour it out while it’s still in a very liquid state,” Marie said. “And you’ll see it spread out to make it nice and thin, like a classic brittle.”
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In order to make homemade marshmallows beautiful and airy, it is important to incorporate air.
“Marshmallows are a lot like nuggets and other things. They’re aerated sweets, and the air in them gives them a whipped appearance,” Marie said. “There’s a whole whipping process that iterates on glucose and sugar and how the molecules interact and react.”
A large 10-pound slab of dark chocolate is broken up into small pieces to create what are called seeds. The base for many sweets.
“We blend it with other chocolates to form a crystallization effect, we blend it with cocoa butter and fine chocolate, and it’s really important to be able to do that process,” Marie explained.
Once the chocolate is melted or tempered, the cook continuously monitors the temperature to check the appearance and taste of the chocolate. There is only so much you can do by following a recipe, and what makes a recipe perfect is experience in the process.
“Some of our cooks have been here for 20 years, and they can, you know, make a lot of nuggets, cream, peanut brittle, caramel quickly. ,” Marie said. “But they follow a very rigorous process that has been honed over many years.”
If it tastes so good, you might not remember the science.
As you can imagine, Valentine’s Day is a big holiday for Marie’s Chocolate. But the candy makers are already making chocolate bunnies for Easter, so they won’t have much time off.
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