Do you know what it takes in spring to please a dozen neighbors and as many children?
Answer: Three cans of maple syrup and snow.
Tonight at my house it was the maple feast and I transformed myself, for an hour, into a “taffy maker”. As usual, to become an expert, I just asked Google and consulted Ricardo.
238. That’s the magic number. A candy thermometer and you heat the syrup to 238F. When the syrup reaches that temperature, it’s taffy.
I learned a lot tonight… Once again, Ricardo disappoints me a little because he doesn’t reveal all his secrets… His recipe promised taffy in 10 minutes… An hour later, it’s not ready and the kids are getting impatient… However, I took a large 10L saucepan to boil 1.5L of syrup. The problem is that while boiling, the syrup makes bubbles and swells until it overflows, we remove the pan from the fire and it cools down and we start again… After an hour of “fooling around”, I took out an 18L cauldron and I was able to evaporate my syrup until it turns into taffy.
So the secret of homemade taffy is to take a pan much bigger than the amount of syrup to boil. Mine had 12x my syrup volume and it was perfect.
I later learned that putting a bit of butter on the top part of the saucepan would prevent bubbles to go over.
That’s it. Happy maple season!
Original post Facebook, March 2016
Martin Pham Dinh 