What is the difference between nougat and taffy

The less water you have in the solution, the harder the resulting candy will generally be. For example, if you want to make hard candy or lollipops , you heat the solution to at least degrees Fahrenheit before letting it cool. If, on the other hand, you want to make fudge , you heat it to only degrees.

Check out the chart below, which is cribbed from Wikipedia source , for all the details. Some of the stages have names, which describe what happens to the solution if you put a spoonful of it in cold water the test that was used before candy thermometers were available. As the sugar is cooked further, the caramel gets darker and darker until it burns.

This also happens as you cook certain other foods as well, which is part of the reason why, for example, sauteeing vegetables can enhance their flavor dramatically. By the way, caramel candy is made by taking the caramel, letting it cool, then mixing it with cream, sugar and vanilla.

Or you can cook everything together and let the sugars in the milk caramelize instead of the added sugar, in which case you have a milk caramel.

With the history taken care of, we can hazard a definition of taffy or chews as a distinct style of candy that just happens to go by a lot of different names. A unique combination of lower cooking temperatures, the addition of fat, and pulling after cooking all work together to keep taffy pliable, chewy, and semi-solid. With the exception of the original molasses version, taffy offers a clean, neutral base for a whole variety of spice, fruit, and other flavours. Much like sorbet or ice cream.

Taffy is essentially a slow-moving liquid, so it is almost always individually wrapped to keep pieces from fusing back together. Taffy is related to soft toffee and caramels, but lacks the butter-centric, caramelized flavours of those sweets. This one may seem obvious, but the most important thing that sets taffy, toffee, and caramel on one side of the border across from fondant and fudge is that they always contain a doctor like cream of tartar, lemon juice, and glucose syrup to stop the sugar from crystallizing.

That keeps the texture long and chewy and smooth, rather than short and crumbly like fudge. Naturally, the world provides examples of weird hybrids: fluffy nougaty taffy, grained fondant-like taffy, nut-butter-stuffed taffy, caramel-flavoured taffy, chocolate-coated taffy, and so on.

But you get the general idea. Here are just some of the better-known examples that spring to mind, along with their countries of origin. Coming up: the essential ingredients of taffy, a handy typology of chewy sweets, and a quick guide to making sense of all of the other ingredients you see popping up in taffy and chew recipes.

Skip to content. In the Western Canadian tongue, toffee left column is a harder sweet that tastes mostly of butter and caramelized sugar. It includes sponge toffee bottom left , which is called cinder toffee or honeycomb elsewhere. Caramel middle column is a similar but softer sweet with milkier flavours, and includes the dessert sauce.

Taffy right column is also soft, but nixes the butter and caramelized sugar in favour of fruit or spice flavours. Your local terms are almost certainly different. Photo credit: Stratford Look at these two saucy characters. Romantic postcard circa Molasses taffy is underloved, if you ask me. This one was an experiment in creating tanned leather flavours using peated whisky, black cardamom, lapsang souchong tea, and smoked sea salt.

Yes, it looks like the poo emoji. Deal with it. Use a serrated knife in a sawing motion to cut the nougat crossways into 3cm-wide pieces and then cut each piece into about 4cm lengths. Cutting the torrone Insert the oiled knife straight down into the torrone, then use the knife to pull the cut piece away.

If the edible paper pulls away in some spots, just place it back over the nougat and continue cutting. You may also consider using kitchen shears to cut the torrone. In Italian nougat, called torrone, it is common to add vanilla or citrus flavoring to the standard nougat mix.

You will never regret indulging yourself with the confections produced by these premier chocolate-makers. Does Milky Way have nougat? Is nougat a marshmallow? Which is better marshmallow or nougat? What is the difference between nougat and marshmallow? Why is it called nougat? Is nougat a taffy? Is there nougat in Snickers? Do you keep nougat in the fridge?

How long does fresh nougat last?