The Ultimate Taffy Blog – Part 1

Taffy is a relatively easy product to make, when it comes to the ingredients anyway. In fact the ingredient list is extremely short compared to other candy products, you only need sugar, corn syrup, water, butter, salt and any flavoring you choose. The ingredients are heated anywhere between 250 and 270 degrees, lower temperatures for chewier taffy, warmer temperatures for more brittle taffy.

Do a quick search however and you will soon find that making taffy is an extremely labor intensive process. Not only do you have to stir the taffy at precisely the right times during the cooking process, you need to take a minimum of 10, some recipes say up to 30 minutes to “pull” the taffy.

Pulling the taffy aerates the candy, meaning it adds tiny air bubbles throughout, which makes it lighter and chewier. Can you imagine having to “pull” anywhere from 10 to 25 pounds of taffy, over and over, until it is of the desired thickness and consistency? I don’t know about you, but that would certainly make my arms extremely tired.

Then after you have finished doing the pulling, you  have to chop the taffy into 1-inch blocks and individually wrap every single piece!

Instead of spending all that time and energy making your own taffy, we recommend saving yourself and simply purchasing some of the fantastic taffy that Candy Direct has to offer.

Fun Fact: The entire taffy making process is now automated. Not only do machines do the pulling of the taffy, but they now chop and wrap up to 700 pieces of taffy a minute!

Let’s begin our exploration of the taffy world with a brief history lesson.

Have you ever wondered where the term “salt water taffy” came from? Well nobody knows for sure, but the most commonly recognized story involved an Atlantic City Boardwalk shopkeeper by the name of David Bradley.

An unusually large storm swamped Bradley’s store and covered all his taffy with seawater. As David was cleaning up the mess the storm left behind, a girl came into his store and asked for a bag of taffy. David sarcastically replied, “don’t you mean ‘salt water taffy?’” The name stuck, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Next time we will dive into just some of the hundreds of taffy products available. Let me tell you, the quantity is astounding! Check out all of Candy Direct‘s taffy products here!

Credit photos:

http://amazingcandy.wikispaces.com/How+It%27s+Made

http://cookingweekends.blogspot.com/2010/07/cape-cod-salt-water-taffy.html

This blog is intern approved! Matthew Rogers

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