Mixing starches with sugar to make chewy candies

candy

This is a bit of a Moby Dick for me. There is this candy, Gingerbon, that that has a very tough (for lack of a better word) chew to them. The texture is like a very chewy taffy that sticks to the nooks in your molars. However, it's resilient enough to not deform under moderate pressure.

The ingredients, listed in order, are simply sugar, tapioca starch, ginger, and vegetable oil.

I suspect the vegetable oil is used as a releasing agent for whatever mold is being used. This is simply based on the idea that the ingredients are listed in order of prominence but, since this is a candy made overseas, the order might not indicate anything.

The candy is mfg'd in Indonesia. I looked it up and found Permen Jahe but the recipes online seem to make something more akin to a gritty tootsie roll.

The only other potential candy that might resemble this in the States is Gin Gins (formerly known as Ginger Chews) by Ginger People. They only list 3 ingredients (no oil).

I'm not 100% sure on this but I believe starch gelatinization breaks down well before the soft-ball stage of sugar so boiling them together at the same time doesn't seem like the best option. Adding it towards the ends seems like a it would just make something akin to twizzlers since, again, it wouldn't have enough water to gelatinize. Adding a slurry of gelatinized tapioca to hot sugar seems like a recipe for disaster…

I would love to experiment but I don't really have the resources for it. Is there another way to get chewy candy with just starch and sugar?

Thanks.

Best Answer

I think it'll be very difficult to mix everything without any liquid, but if you cook everything long enough until (almost?) all liquid is evaporated, maybe it's not necessary to list it anymore.

But here is some info to get you started on your experiments:

In Germany there are tons of "vegan gums" with very similar ingredients like your candy, but they all list fruit juice. I found a product with slightly more detailed ingredients list than usual that may be similar to what you ate here. If you experiment with the added liquid, you may get chewy candy.

The shortened and generalized list of ingredients is: invert sugar syrup; 15% fruit juice; starch, glucose syrup, 4% ginger pulp; acidifier; ginger extract.

Usually, "starch" refers to potato or corn starch here. But I've seen "modified starch" on the packages and "tapioca starch", too.

Unfortunately I only found one recipe to cook something similar to that here (also in German, sorry). The ingredients if condensed are also basically sugar, starch, liquid, some carrageen (see note #1) and flavouring.

The tl;dr recipe would be:

  1. Mix everything, bring to boil
  2. Stir a lot until the bottom of the pan becomes visible between strokes
  3. Dial down and continue cooking while continuously stirring until "your desired toughness" is reached. To test this, a small piece is dropped into cold water (sounds a lot like cooking sugar).
  4. While warm, the mass can be pressed into molds (either starch dusted or silicon). The oil is used to remove the starch and bring it to shine.

Annotation #1: The mentioned recipe uses "Tortenguss" which is mainly modified starch and some carrageen. Also, the author uses three types of sugar (refined sugar, glucose and fructose).

Annotation #2: Someone in the comments of the mentioned recipe reported that they cooked everything so long it became hard candy.

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