Friday, December 13, 2013

The Toffee Story

Once upon a time - three nights ago to be exact - the weather was cold and crisp.  A true toffee and peanut brittle making night.  As Deb walked out of work that evening, she thought, "Yes!  This could be the night!  This could be our only window to make toffee and peanut brittle, so tonight it is."

Deb rushed home and out of her work clothes.  She kissed G (perhaps not in that order) and got to finding the ingredients for both.  Oops!  No peanuts, so we will have to tell that story another day.

But Deb almost always has toffee ingredients on hand, because there are only two:  1 lb. of butter and 1 lb. of sugar, better known as 2 c. of sugar. 
 
Deb turns on the heat and starts to melt and stir both together into one homogenous mixture of yummy goodness.


She adds her trusty candy thermometer and continues stirring.
By about 260, the toffee is taking on a lovely caramel color.  She stirs and watches her thermometer and it climbs to 290, and this is when the horror happens as depicted in this video below.  Is the horror in Deb's choice of attire since she wasn't planning on being featured in any pics or video?  Is the horror in the odd angle of her arm as she sets the thermometer to the side?  Is the horror in Deb's backside facing the camera?  Nay, my friends.  The horror is much worse than all of these combined. 
 
 
The horror is even more insidious than any of those I've described above.  For at this point, Deb is not aware of the horror that awaits her.  Nay, (yes, I did just use the word "nay" twice in < a minute - I'm feeling rather dramatic in an Old English sort of way)...er, nay, Deb is concentrating on watching the toffee cool, so she can begin to score it with her pastry bench scraper.  Deb loves her pastry bench scraper.  She is fairly certain that it will be called out in her will.  Deb knows that if she starts too soon with scoring, it's a pointless exercise, but if she waits too late, if the toffee is too cool, it will break and not score.  So she is focusing on scoring.  And before too long, G takes over, so Deb can start to break apart each column.  Scoring toffee is almost like turning a sheet of toffee into an Excel spreadsheet if you're an Excel lover and that idea appeals to you on a certain level.  If you are not an Excel lover, then pretend you never read that sentence.


Note the towel in the lower portion of this pic?  G's hand is underneath said towel, because trust me, the pan gets hot from the candy.  But just look at those rows and columns!  Aren't they just about the prettiest?  This is just about the best toffee scoring Deb can remember.  EVER!  (Cause now I'm no longer feeling dramatic in an old English sort of way.  Now I'm feeling dramatic in an about 17 years old sort of way.)
And this is when the horror rears its ugly face!  One of those beautifully scored and broken pieces breaks in the process, so Deb and G decide to use it as a quality taste test.  Deb takes her bite.  G takes his bite, and they both look at each other.  They look at each other for a long time before Deb finally says what she tastes in her mouth and can see in G's eyes.
 
"It's burnt." 
 
"Yep," G replied. 
 
They continued to look at each other for any ideas on how to use or salvage this, but before too long one of them says, "There's still time to make another batch tonight.  We have butter and sugar."  And then G pulls the trash can over, and together they slide the entire batch, waxed paper and all, in there and start over. 
 
Go ahead.  Insert your comments like Deb's friend, S, at work did.
 
"That's the worst thing I've heard in weeks."
 
"Bad toffee is better than no toffee."
 
S even compared it to a bad batch of beer he made one time.  Now S is quite the accomplished beer maker.  He's been doing it for over 10 years now, and gives bottles away as Christmas gifts.  Trust me, he knows what he's doing.  But like experienced toffee makers, even the best beer meister makes a mistake every now and then. If there is the slightest bit of bacteria anywhere in the equipment, it will be a bad batch of beer.  And such must have been the case with a batch S made one time.  He opened the first bottle and spit it back out.  He tried the second bottle.  Same thing.  As S is pouring this down the drain, he would try a bottle here and there just in case.  By about the 12th bottle, he gave up trying any more.  S concluded this beer making story by saying, "I felt almost as bad about that bad batch of beer as I feel about this toffee story."
 

Please don't judge G and Deb too harshly.  You may call them toffee snobs, if you like, but there really isn't anything they knew do to fix a burnt sugar taste.  Deb has friends whose son, J, is a professional chef.  He might have been able to do something with this burned toffee, but G and Deb quietly threw this batch away, got out another pound of butter, another 2 cups of sugar and started again.

Although - and this is the real moral of the story - they used a different pan, a smaller pan.  For even though Deb had pulled the toffee off of the heat, the candy continued to cook and must have risen a few degrees higher and with the larger surface area, it burned.  And this time, G and Deb took it off the heat at about 286 degrees so that it could rise those last few degrees by itself before pouring up.

But look!  This story has a happy ending!  See how beautiful this time?
When you see the pics side by side, it's obvious which is the good batch and which is the bad one, but when you don't make it all the time, and you don't have a good batch color spec to refer to as you pour up the bad batch, it isn't as obvious...
 
 
Now that we have a happy ending to our story, G and Deb spent last night giving these toffee pieces a bath in warm chocolate.  They started with the naked toffee...just like babies and children...
They laid them gently in the bath of warm chocolate...
...gave each piece a good coating so they were all nice and covered (bath analogies can only go so far) and then dripped them off.
 

And lo and behold!  Beautiful, unburned, chocolate coated toffee.  Ooo!!  Aaah!!  Ready for sharing with family and friends.
The End.

I hope you have enjoyed this story - that the drama wasn't too scary and you feel better now than in the climax of the horrors.  The good guys in white hats won, so all is well with the world again.

And now I am off to bake pies.  For we have a mini-Morrison Family Pie Night to celebrate tomorrow eve!  We are taking the Morrison Family Pie Night on the road!  And the blueberries have already simmered their magic in the wine....happy sigh...

Thanks for stopping by and Merry Christmas!  (I never get tired of saying that phrase...)

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