Read Online True Confections by Katharine Weber - Free Book Online

feeling the day I first saw Frieda exhibit symptoms of dementia and had to admit to myself what I had known for a while, that she was losing it, but I suppose that was a different shade of black, in the pantheon of my darkest moments. Our relationship was always tricky, and she made it hard for me to love her, but there was something really admirable in her toughness and her loyalty to the family, and to the business, even though she was pretty hard on me over the years. She did soften a little toward me after Jacob and Julie were born (I once overheard her telling one of her Hadassah cronies that the problem with me was that I was a dumb goy with two smart Jewish children). Given that my purpose in these pages is to say everything I can about Zip’s Candies and to give history and background to establish my knowledge of the facts about the current issues, and given that every piece of Ziplinsky family history is also Zip’s Candies history, and also given that I have just described an instance of Frieda’s dementia that was potentially harmful to the business, I might as well describe that first incident now, given that Frieda’s behavior in her final years could have exposed Zip’s to very damaging liabilities, for which I could have been blamed.
    I documented this incident at the time, seven years ago. I was helping with a pour and blend for a big batch of Tigermelt nougat. People are amazed at how much is still done by hand at Zip’s. Creating the necessary machinery to automate some of these functions on the line would cost a fortune, and our batches are so small, it just wouldn’t pay to automate each of these steps unless it was part of a bigger plan to increase production and distribution in a substantial way. And it could be surprisingly difficult to get it right, to create efficient machines that wouldduplicate precisely every step of the unique processes that are integral to production on our three lines.
    Ironically enough, Tigermelts contain no butter. We all know what happened to the competitive tigers in
Little Black Sambo
—“they all just melted away, and there was nothing left but a great big pool of melted butter … round the foot of the tree.” For the Tigermelt centers, when the marshmallow nougat (a proprietary blend of egg whites, sucrose, and corn syrup) and the caramel (dried milk solids, sucrose, molasses, and vanilla) are cooled to just the right temperatures in their blending pots, they are then poured and swirled together in a partial blend, not a fifty-fifty blend, more like seventy-thirty, with more nougat than caramel, and then the hot fried peanuts are stirred in. This all takes both physical strength and coordination and also really specific timing, so it requires teamwork. You are rushing to beat the clock as you blend this beige goop just a certain amount in a very precise way, on a big, sinklike batch table.
    Time and temperature are two key ingredients in every candy line. Time and temperature, Sam used to say, they’re your friend, or they’re your enemy. If you don’t control the time and the temperature, you will have no quality control, you may ruin your product, and you will never have a smooth-running line. You have to own the time and the temperature, or the time and the temperature will own you. Eli cared about tempering, and it was a point of pride for Sam that Zip’s Candies has always had a high standard for well-tempered chocolate, and it is a feature of the Tigermelt coating. Tempering is chocolate alchemy, mechanical manipulation plus precise heat in order to force chocolate into the desirable crystalline form so that when it is properly cooled it forms a stable solid with a smooth and shiny surface.
    When the Tigermelt center mixture is sufficiently blendedand cooled, you have only about a seven-minute window to stir in the hot fried peanuts. It has to happen at just the right time as the temperature of the mixture cools, so the peanuts are blended all the way