At the weekend I made some Turkish Delight based on the recipe featured in a recent BBC series called "Sweets Made Simple". Simple maybe, but highly effortful. The recipe is here, but the brief summary is: make a sugar syrup, take it to the required temperature. Make a thick cornstarch paste. Add syrup to paste and stir and simmer for an hour until it's smooth and not lumpy.
Now maybe it's just me, but pouring a load of liquid into a cornstarch paste has always been the thing you're supposed to avoid if you don't want lumps. Maybe it's different with sugar syrup at this temperature and with a cornstarch paste this thick, but it seems to me that surely there must be an easier way to make it.
The end results here are good enough that I'm intending to do some experiments, but I wanted to consult the wisdom of this community beforehand in case there is already an easier way known. I've seen other recipes which say you only need to stir it every 8-10 minutes for an hour, but that to my mind isn't going to be enough at all, judging by how my mixture reacted to stirring. Of course, maybe there was some subtle difference earlier in the recipe which I haven't noticed.
Best Answer
I've just had a go today. I only stirred until all the lumps of cornstarch lumps had gone, about 20 mins. It was getting very thick then! Note that the lemon juice with the sugar and the cream of tartar in the cornflour mix will convert some of the sugar to invert sugar, which is supposed to help reduce the growth and size of sugar crystals (I learnt about this whilst making fudge, which starts with the same sugar heated to softball stage, and marshmallows, which are like the Turkish delight mixture if made with gelatine, just whipped to incorporate a lot of air.) Overall the process is quite simple, as you say, it is time consuming. Good luck with future trials. Chris