The lost art of candy-making
At a vintage-style emporium in Tallahassee, Florida, Greg Cohen is pouring hot, lavender-flavoured sugar syrup onto a table’s smooth metal surface. He mixes in patches of food colouring – some purple, for lavender blossoms, and some green, for stalks. Over the next 40 minutes, Greg will roll, stretch, arrange, snip and otherwise manipulate the sugar until he is left, as if by magic, with a fresh scattering of candies, each containing an exquisite little image of a lavender plant.
“It’s an exercise in speed,” Greg told Ernest Wright over Zoom.
“You have to plan every move ahead of time, because you can only work the candy while it’s at the right temperature. You can’t just stop and think.”
Candy-making – the real, hands-on kind – is an endangered craft. The story is a familiar one: starting with small factories and skilled confectioners, and ending with a market dominated by mass-producing corporations like Mars, Wrigley and Haribo.
“The flavour and the art were lost,” says Greg.
“You ended up having more and more middlemen. When candy was handmade it was sold by the person who made it. It was a personal thing.”
Greg’s business, Lofty Pursuits, is one of a relative few that still make candy by hand.
Tools of the trade
While much of the work of candy-making is done with (gloved) hands, there are a few tools Greg can’t do without. He uses a wall-mounted hook to stretch the molten sugar, a batch roller to keep the sugar from flattening out, a metal table to keep the sugar hot and workable, and the pièce de résistance, a pair of scissors.
At Ernest Wright, we’re well aware that the right scissors can cut all sorts of things – from thread and fabric to metal wire and carbon fibre – but this is the first time we’ve encountered a scissors-wielding candy-maker.
“We use them to cut the molten sugar,” says Greg.
“When the sugar cools down to a certain point, it’s sort of the consistency of clay. If we hit it hard enough it will break smoothly – and scissors can do that, whether it’s with a strike or a cut.”
Greg prefers to use scissors made from carbon steel, due to that material’s heat transfer properties.
“Whereas in stainless steel the heat stays in one part, in carbon steel the heat is conducted to a large area,” he says.
“You see, the candy wants to stick to whatever is getting close to being as hot as the candy. As long as the scissors stay cooler – and they do stay cooler because they are carbon steel and effectively vent the heat – they are for our purposes non-stick.”
Among Greg’s numerous pairs of scissors, his favourites are a Brazilian model which features a part that can be used as a hammer, and a pair of Ernest Wright Tailor’s Shears. By using these scissors, Greg follows in the footsteps of his grandfather, who worked as a cutter in Manchester, England before emigrating to the United States.
How Lofty Pursuits went from yo-yos to bon-bons
When it comes to playful pastimes, Greg is quite the polymath.
“My business has been around since 1986, when I started by manufacturing juggling equipment,” says Greg.
“In ‘93 I opened a storefront, quit the day job, expanded into yo-yos, and ran the World Yo-Yo Contest for 14 years.”
After Lofty Pursuits moved to its current location in 2010, Greg added a classic American soda fountain and a candy-making sideline to Lofty Pursuits’ offering.
“I stumbled across this candy-maker whose brother was a yo-yo player, and I offered him a job if he’d teach me how to make candy,” says Greg.
“For two years I was an apprentice to someone I was paying – and I discovered I was really good at it!”
A decade on, Lofty Pursuits’ candy has strong online and local followings. Greg ships his candy worldwide, and regularly shares his expertise with an audience of over 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.
The key to good candy? Chemistry
Candy-making could well be described as an art, but it has its foundations in science. Behind the vigorous hand-rolling and stretching of the molten sugar, a complex chemical dance is taking place.
“We need to keep the sugar from crystallising, so that we have an amorphous material,” says Greg.
“To do that, we use a combination of two types of sugar with different crystal structures – glucose and sucrose, for example.”
Even local weather conditions may affect a batch of candy, as Greg explains:
“We dissolve the sugars in water to make a solution. We heat it up, and by measuring the temperature we calculate when almost all the water is gone. We want to keep about 0.5% of it.
“We have to constantly adjust the temperature, because water only actually boils at 100℃ under certain conditions. It is affected by air pressure – and we have a lot of rain storms here in Florida, so we have to keep adjusting.
“So much of hard sugar work is chemistry.”
Making candy better than ever
Greg may be fascinated with the history and tradition of candy-making, but it’s clear that his overriding passion is to drive his craft forward.
“I wanna do new stuff, ” says Greg.
“Most candymakers are worried predominantly about the images; I’m also worried about the flavours. We’re very good at reproducing something with a ridiculous flavour profile. For instance, we just did a collaboration with a brewery, where they made a Berliner beer and we made a carbonated piece of candy to match.
“When you put the candy in your mouth, it is the experience of the beer.”
From classic tangerine sours and image candies to new creations like the carbonised beer candy, Greg’s shop shelves are brimming with colour, flavour and connections.
“The art, illustration, sculpture, science – it’s all tied together in candy,” says Greg.
“This is where you can taste history, and I love it.”
Watch Greg make his candy by hand on YouTube.
