Candy Making Basics

Rating:
Summary: Great candy making starter book
Review: I LOVE candy and decided I'd like to make some of my own, instead of shelling out $20 per pound. This book is a terrific starter book. It has pictures of all the candy so you can see if yours turns out looking the same. It gives great tips and starter information for the beginner. There are all kinds of recipes for chocolates, caramels, hard candies, soft candies, caramel corn, etc. The book even has recipes for making your own marshmallows and sweetened milk, in case you don't have any. I am really enjoying this book alot and may even buy another copy for a gift.

Rating:
Summary: Just another recipe book
Review: If the title of this book had been "Making Basic Candies" instead of "Candy Making Basics", I might not have been as disappointed. Of course, I probably wouldn't have bought the book, either. As it is, though, instead of learning the basics of candy making, I got about 15 pages of discussion of some techniques followed by about 90 pages of recipes.

Plus, about 3/4 of the recipes were just variations on the other 1/4. The book did include recipes for a few of the basic pieces (butter, but not milk, caramel, marshmallows, and fondant, though it excluded nougat and marzipan for some reason, unless I just missed those pages), and they will be helpful to me, but they were pure recipes with no discussion of why you need to do anything.

For example, one recipe might say to bring a mixture to 238 degrees over medium heat while another says to do it over low heat. Why? What would happen if I boiled the latter over medium heat? Why must this kind of candy be stirred constantly for 22 minutes while that kind only needs occasional stirring? Why did she decide to add butter to the chocolate in the rocky road? What effect does it have? How do I control the texture of caramels? Why add chocolate to your fudge before heating instead of after?

Also, the author explicitly chose to omit all recipes requiring tempered chocolate. She included a number that call for chocolate flavored covering, though, which often left me wondering whether the chocolate flavored covering was there as a substitute for tempered choclate, or because it actually works better for the application.

The book also doesn't contain any information on common problems with the recipes, how to work around those problems, or even good definitions of basic terms (what exactly makes a fondant a fondant, anyway?)

I learned more about the basics of candy making from the sections on sugar and chocolate in "On Food and Cooking" (ISBN 0684843285) than I did from this book. I am really disappointed, because this is one of the few books I've found that purports to discuss the basics of candy making in a broad sense.

My next read on the subject will be "Candymaking" (ISBN 0895863073). It sounds like that book will be much closer to what I want.

Rating:
Summary: Just another recipe book
Review: If the title of this book had been "Making Basic Candies" instead of "Candy Making Basics", I might not have been as disappointed. Of course, I probably wouldn't have bought the book, either. As it is, though, instead of learning the basics of candy making, I got about 15 pages of discussion of some techniques followed by about 90 pages of recipes.

Plus, about 3/4 of the recipes were just variations on the other 1/4. The book did include recipes for a few of the basic pieces (butter, but not milk, caramel, marshmallows, and fondant, though it excluded nougat and marzipan for some reason, unless I just missed those pages), and they will be helpful to me, but they were pure recipes with no discussion of why you need to do anything.

For example, one recipe might say to bring a mixture to 238 degrees over medium heat while another says to do it over low heat. Why? What would happen if I boiled the latter over medium heat? Why must this kind of candy be stirred constantly for 22 minutes while that kind only needs occasional stirring? Why did she decide to add butter to the chocolate in the rocky road? What effect does it have? How do I control the texture of caramels? Why add chocolate to your fudge before heating instead of after?

Also, the author explicitly chose to omit all recipes requiring tempered chocolate. She included a number that call for chocolate flavored covering, though, which often left me wondering whether the chocolate flavored covering was there as a substitute for tempered choclate, or because it actually works better for the application.

The book also doesn't contain any information on common problems with the recipes, how to work around those problems, or even good definitions of basic terms (what exactly makes a fondant a fondant, anyway?)

I learned more about the basics of candy making from the sections on sugar and chocolate in "On Food and Cooking" (ISBN 0684843285) than I did from this book. I am really disappointed, because this is one of the few books I've found that purports to discuss the basics of candy making in a broad sense.

My next read on the subject will be "Candymaking" (ISBN 0895863073). It sounds like that book will be much closer to what I want.

Rating:
Summary: Just another recipe book
Review: If the title of this book had been "Making Basic Candies" instead of "Candy Making Basics", I might not have been as disappointed. Of course, I probably wouldn't have bought the book, either. As it is, though, instead of learning the basics of candy making, I got about 15 pages of discussion of some techniques followed by about 90 pages of recipes.

Plus, about 3/4 of the recipes were just variations on the other 1/4. The book did include recipes for a few of the basic pieces (butter, but not milk, caramel, marshmallows, and fondant, though it excluded nougat and marzipan for some reason, unless I just missed those pages), and they will be helpful to me, but they were pure recipes with no discussion of why you need to do anything.

For example, one recipe might say to bring a mixture to 238 degrees over medium heat while another says to do it over low heat. Why? What would happen if I boiled the latter over medium heat? Why must this kind of candy be stirred constantly for 22 minutes while that kind only needs occasional stirring? Why did she decide to add butter to the chocolate in the rocky road? What effect does it have? How do I control the texture of caramels? Why add chocolate to your fudge before heating instead of after?

Also, the author explicitly chose to omit all recipes requiring tempered chocolate. She included a number that call for chocolate flavored covering, though, which often left me wondering whether the chocolate flavored covering was there as a substitute for tempered choclate, or because it actually works better for the application.

The book also doesn't contain any information on common problems with the recipes, how to work around those problems, or even good definitions of basic terms (what exactly makes a fondant a fondant, anyway?)

I learned more about the basics of candy making from the sections on sugar and chocolate in "On Food and Cooking" (ISBN 0684843285) than I did from this book. I am really disappointed, because this is one of the few books I've found that purports to discuss the basics of candy making in a broad sense.

My next read on the subject will be "Candymaking" (ISBN 0895863073). It sounds like that book will be much closer to what I want.

Rating:
Summary: Color Pictures Make This Book a Stand-Out
Review: This book is a very simple and straightforward introduction to the basics of making homemade candy. It does not provide in-depth instructions, HOWEVER, there are many many color pictures which I found very helpful as a beginning candy maker. The instructions are easy to follow and the recipes are not too complex. There is a little bit of everything in here and you really can't go wrong for the price.