let's melt some sugar

The first fancy dessert garnish I remember learning was spun sugar. For me it was brilliant. As a young apprentice I learned an easy but very good looking garnish.

But that was the start of it all. Since pastry was not my forte, I was glad that I could do such work.

The more I practiced and read the more it fascinated me. How simple sugar granules can be converted to something so beautiful and the possibilities were endless.

You start with refined sugar, pure crystalline sweetness, put it in a pan by itself, and turn on the heat. When the sugar rises above 160°C, the solid crystals begin to melt together into a colorless syrup. Then another 10 degrees above that, the syrup begins to turn brown, emits a rich, mouth-watering aroma (I remember butter scotch, will talk about it at length some other time), and adds tart and bitter to its original sweetness. 

That's the magic of cooking front and center: from one odorless, colorless, simply sweet molecule, heat creates hundreds of different molecules, some aromatic and some tasty and some colored.

How does heat turn sugar into caramel? Heat is a kind of energy that makes atoms and molecules move faster. In room-temperature table sugar, the sucrose molecules are jittery but standing in place, held still by the forces of attraction to their neighbours. As the sugar heats up in the pan, its molecules get more and more jittery, to the point that their jitters overcome the attractive forces and they can jump from one set of neighbours to another. The solid crystals thus become a free-flowing liquid. Then, as the temperature of the sugar molecules continues to rise, the force of their jittering and jumping becomes stronger than the forces holding their own atoms together. The molecules break apart into fragments, and the fragments slam into each other hard enough to form new molecules.

That's what I've thought for many years, along with most cooks and confectioners and carbohydrate chemists: heat melts sugar, and then begins to break it apart and create the delicious mixture we call caramel.

And we've all been wrong.

It turns out that, strictly speaking, sugar doesn't actually melt.  And it can caramelize while it's still solid. So proved chemist Shelly Schmidt and her colleagues at the University of Illinois.

It's dismaying to think that so many could be so wrong for so long about such a basic ingredient and process! But it's also a rare opportunity to rethink the possibilities of the basic.

So what I say is the way we found out that things aren’t always the way we have been thinking they are, lets melt some more sugar in various forms of our lives, keep inventing and reinventing. 

Let’s melt some more sugar, and maybe it’ll not need to be melted to make caramel.