The Soft-Ball Stage

It was cold and rainy here last night, so I took the opportunity to make fudge, which I'd been meaning to do, and had bought extra sugar, chocolate, clear corn syrup, and butter in preparation for candy cooking. I make small batches, not like the commercial candy kitchens. In Portland, I saw a slab of chocolate fudge four feet wide and thirty feet long that had been poured out on a marble slab, after cooling, there was a special cutter with wheels like a pizza knife. I don't have a big copper pot either, so I cook in enamel and stir with a wooden spoon to ward-off crystalization. My general formula is 2 cups sugar, 1 cup water, 2 oz. chocolate, 1 tbsp. clear corn syrup, and 1/3 stick butter. Same for peanut butter fudge, using 4 tbsp of peanut butter instead of 2 oz. chocolate. The soft-ball part is for testing to see if the stuff is cooked enough, a bit of the mix is dropped into a cup of cold water, if it makes a ball, it's done. The strawberry farm, we'd get 350 pints of berries a day, and had more than we could sell, so, ended up making wine, jam and syrup. Some people cheat and use pectin to make jam or jelly, but if you cook berries, water and sugar enough, it'll set. The test for jam is to tilt a wooden spoon and if the mix stops halfway across the spoon, it's done and will make thick jam when cool. This works for cherries, blackberries, blueberries, peaches, plums, damsons, and grapes.

I didn't cook the first batch of peanut butter fudge enough, and upon cooling, it didn't seem to be the right consistency, so I cooked it more and that did the trick. I looked up prep time for fudge, and it says an hour and fifty minutes, so I should have allowed more time and not quit too soon. When we were kids, sometimes we'd pull taffy and it was a mess and took a long time. The first time that I saw a taffy-pulling machine, I stared at it for about an hour, it's very hypnotic. It looks like two bicycle cranks with the pedals all on one side, the two cranks turn in opposite directions laying the taffy over the pedals and stretching it.

My blood-sugar is prolly 850 at this point!