The physical chemistry of making fudge

Chocolate Fudge Cubed, originally uploaded by ZakVTA.

A little science to enhance your holiday confections: The Physical Chemistry of Making Fudge.

Comments

[minstrel hussain boy]

i once fielded a phone call from a frantic friend. (alliteration unintentional, i swear)

she asked "what makes my fudge grainy?"

i said "cooking."

"huh?"

"really, just cooking. you might have cooked it too fast, or, not fast enough. you might have stirred it too much, or, not enough. you might have had the heat too high, or it might have been not high enough.

or it might have been the weather."

chocolate is magic stuff. it requires a firm grounding in voodoo techniques.

i love it.

[cfrost]

Peanut butter fudge!!!!

A chemist I once met told me that he had worked at some place where they had done all sorts of sugar chemistry for many years. He said they had to be very careful to take sugar in the dust there into account. Sometimes they didn’t want a solution to crystallize and they had to exclude dust, and other times they took advantage of airborne dust in the lab to seed solutions.