Candy Making Basics
by Evelyn Howe Fryatt

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Book Reviews of Candy Making Basics

Book Review: Just another recipe book
Summary: 3 Stars

Plus, about 3/4 of the recipes were just variations on the other 1/4. The book did include recipes for a few of the basic pieces (butter, but not milk, caramel, marshmallows, and fondant, though it excluded nougat and marzipan for some reason, unless I just missed those pages), and they will be helpful to me, but they were pure recipes with no discussion of why you need to do anything.

For example, one recipe might say to bring a mixture to 238 degrees over medium heat while another says to do it over low heat. Why? What would happen if I boiled the latter over medium heat? Why must this kind of candy be stirred constantly for 22 minutes while that kind only needs occasional stirring? Why did she decide to add butter to the chocolate in the rocky road? What effect does it have? How do I control the texture of caramels? Why add chocolate to your fudge before heating instead of after?

Also, the author explicitly chose to omit all recipes requiring tempered chocolate. She included a number that call for chocolate flavored covering, though, which often left me wondering whether the chocolate flavored covering was there as a substitute for tempered choclate, or because it actually works better for the application.

The book also doesn't contain any information on common problems with the recipes, how to work around those problems, or even good definitions of basic terms (what exactly makes a fondant a fondant, anyway?)

I learned more about the basics of candy making from the sections on sugar and chocolate in "On Food and Cooking" (ISBN 0684843285) than I did from this book. I am really disappointed, because this is one of the few books I've found that purports to discuss the basics of candy making in a broad sense.

My next read on the subject will be "Candymaking" (ISBN 0895863073). It sounds like that book will be much closer to what I want.

Summary of Candy Making Basics

Meals Books

• Subjects > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Meals