Candy Making Basics

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 96 pages
• Published by: Sterling June 30, 1999
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1895569257
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1895569254
• Book Dimensions: 10 x 8.5 x 0.4 inches
• Weighs: 11.5 ounces

Product Description
"nearly 100 recipes for types of candies that will have no time to melt in your mouths.the author's contributions to the cook book shelf are twofold: one, streamlining directions so that anyone can duplicate good results, and, two, creating enough variations to satisfy different palates.Kids can wield a thermometer and wooden spoon too, thanks to 26 special concoctions written for little hands and sweet teeth.Color photographs aplenty."--Booklist. "[one] of the best cookbooksa gorgeous book that contains more than 100 recipes and simple instructions."--Chicago Sun-Times.


Reader Reviews
If the title of this book had been "Making Basic Candies" instead of "Candy Making Basics", I might not have been as disappointed. Of course, I probably wouldn't have bought the book, either. As it is, though, instead of learning the basics of candy making, I got about 15 pages of discussion of some techniques followed by about ninety pages of recipes. 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. Comment | | (Report this)