Sugar: Fudge and Caramel

This past week was devoted to learning all about sugar. Did you know that sugar performs many, many functions in desserts OTHER than sweetening? For example, it delays the gelatinization of starches and also inhibits gluten development. It stabilizes whipped egg whites and tenderizes by attracting moisture. We spent this week making different things that used sugar cooked to all of its different stages. First, we made a sugar syrup boiled to the thread stage. With the sugar syrup, we made fresh squeezed lemonade. Not "baked," but yummy. We then made fudge, the old-fashioned way, which uses sugar boiled to the soft-ball stage. We made Italian Meringue (sugar is firm ball), Divinity (an old-fashioned candy, sugar cooked to hard ball stage), Torrone (soft-crack) and lastly, peanut brittle (hard-crack). We also learned how to make caramel, which is sugar that is cooked just past the hard crack stage, right before it burns. Caramel can be cooked using a sugar/water slurry, or you can just cook the sugar by itself, which is much faster (you don't have to evaporate any water off), but also much easier to burn. With the caramel, we made spun sugar nests and molded sugar cages. We will do a lot more with this in the future.