MR DACH

Taffy talk 3: What are all of those other ingredients in fruit chews?

I’m back with another epic post about taffy, and also a promise that it’s my last damned epic post about taffy — at least for the foreseeable future. We’ve already covered the essentials of what makes a taffy or chew. And while it does takes some elbow grease, it’s not a mind-blowingly complex recipe.

How do you make fruit chews? Here are the six essential ingredients of taffy and a stripped-down recipe.?

As a general rule, I don’t have any plans to share a bunch of candy recipes here — the internet is already bursting with them. But for taffy I’m making a wee exception. The trouble with making taffy or fruit chews is that even good recipes vary wildly, with so many confusing secondary ingredients that it can be hard to see the internal logic churning away underneath it all.

What is taffy? Let’s make some sense of this oddly confounding chewy sweet.?

I’ve been spending a whole mess of time perfecting my taffy recipe lately, and whenever some poor soul gets me going about it, the first question is almost always the same: “Wait, what’s taffy again?” For such a prosaic candy — you can buy some version of it quite literally at every gas station and corner shop across much of the world — taffy has a bit of an identity problem.

Sugarfina Candy doesn’t make candy. Maybe that’s ok? But maybe it isn’t?

Sugarfina is one of those self-described “luxury boutiques” that takes a quotidian idea — the candy shop — and tries to elevate it with a curated inventory and an eye for design.

The year is 2016. What’s Mr Dach gonna do about it?

New Year’s resolutions are like dreams. Everyone has them, and nobody really wants to hear about other people’s. So this isn’t about resolutions. It’s about predictions.