I have a child with a restricted diet that can have no added sugar or other form of sweetener, with the exception of fruit juice. He is in desperate need of cough drops or throat lozenges, but I find they simply don't exist without some form of added sweetener in them. My idea was to craft a hard candy with just fruit juice as sweetener, and then just add menthol or something similar for soothing cough/throat. But I also can't find any recipes for hard candy using only fruit juice as a sweetener. Is it because the sugar or corn syrup, etc is needed to make the candy hard?? Is what I am trying to do even possible?
Sugar – How to make hard candy with only fruit as a sweetener
candychemistrysugar-free
Related Topic
- How to make sparkling powder for candy
- How to inject carbon dioxide into hard candy, to make popping rocks
- We’re trying to make hard crack candy,the humidity in the house is 50%
- How to compensate for citric acid in hard candy
- What function would tartaric acid play in the making of gumthe candy
- Sugar – ice cream with alternate sweetener
- Sugar – How to adjust for making candy from corn syrup instead of sugar
- How to get a dry surface on gummie candies
Best Answer
I think classic hard candy would be difficult if not impossible to make with fruit juice because it combines the fruit sugars (fructose) with a lot of other things, and hard candy is normally made by heating sucrose (table sugar, which is 50% fructose, 50% glucose) to the hard-crack stage (300-310F) to the point where it is essentially 99% sugar. As the sucrose heats it hydrolyzes into glucose and fructose which changes the structure.
Pure fructose does not behave the same way as sucrose. I think you need some glucose to get it to form into a hard candy. (You can also make hard candy from sugar and high fructose corn syrup instead of from table sugar.)
Additionally, fruit juice isn't pure fructose to begin with and the other things in the juice would cause problems with the process and would probably scorch.
I think the idea given in the comments of trying for a gummy or a syrup will work better.